Jeri Usbay

Yes we are addicted to Facebook, we have admitted that to ourselves already.  We receive positive reinforcement whenever someone likes our comments or posts to our Timeline.  And we love all the love from the many birthday greetings.  The benefit of Facebook is that it connects us to friends, acquaintances, and businesses.  It is a great networking tool, but not when we miss posts, or have so many posts we can’t find the ones that are important to us.  Facebook is not as much fun when we start missing out.

If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, the number of friends and pages you’ve liked no doubt has grown to the point where you cannot possibly see every update from every friend and page.   You may already know that your News Feed is filtering all these posts – you are not seeing every post from every friend  and business you’ve liked. How Facebook filters is their secret,  and it does change periodically. What to do?  Check out these suggestions for using facebook.com (mobile app options do exist though may be slightly different than depicted here).

1.  Sort your  News Feed by Most Recent rather than Top Stories.  You will then see updates in the order they were posted, rather than by the order Facebook believes is most relevant for you.  Try it both ways and see the difference.  The option is in the left column of your News Feed, under Favorites.  Once you set the filter to Most Recent it may reset to Top Stories,  so you may want to notice how you’re filtering when you land on your News Feed.  

2.  Use the Pages Feed.  To easily see updates from business pages that you have liked,click on your Pages Feed  (left column of  your News Feed below Favorites list).  You may be surprised at what you’ve been missing!

3.  Create Friends Lists.  I really think this is the best way of controlling your News Feed, and easily seeing what is most important to you. Click on Friends from the left column of your News Feed, then Create List.    Enter a list name (e.g., Friends with Dogs, Book Club), add friends to the list, and when you click on Create, your News Feed will now be filtered by this list.  To see your full News Feed, click on Home (or News Feed from your Favorites in left column).  Once you have lists you can just click on the list name under Friends (from your News Feed)  to filter your News Feed to see only updates from people on the list.

Note that Facebook has already created 3 friend lists for you:  Close Friends (will appear more frequently in your News Feed), Acquaintances (will appear less frequently in your News Feed), and Restricted.  (Put people on your Restricted list if you only want them to see posts you’ve made public.)  If you don’t see all your lists, click on Friends from the left column of your News Feed to see them all.  If you are on a friend’s Timeline and want to add them to a list, just click on Friends near the bottom of their cover photo, and you will see an option to add them to an existing list (you can also create a new list here).

Once you make use of  Friends Lists to filter your News Feed, you can also use  your lists as a sharing option when you post.  A friend can be on multiple lists, and only you (and Facebook) are aware of the list.

Facebook also has 4 Smart Lists, lists which automatically update dependent upon information in your profile and profiles of your friends.

4.  Be direct.   Of course you can always go directly to the Timeline of a friend or business.  This is the best way to make sure you have not missed any updates.

This may all sound like a bit of  “work” but really, it is easy to manage your News Feed – try it, you’ll like it (no Facebook pun intended)!