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?
1. Sort your News Feed by Most Recent rather than Top Stories. You will 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 on the top right of the beginning of your News Feed. 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). You may be surprised at what you've been missing!
3. Create a Friends list. 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., Book Club, Gym Friends) 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 the top 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 three friend lists for you: Close Friends, Acquaintances, and Restricted. (Put people on your Restricted list if you only want them to see posts you've made public.) If you are on a friend's Timeline and want to add them to a list, just click on Friends under their cover photo, and you will see an option to add them to an existing list (you can also create a new list here).
4. Create an Interests list. An Interest list will filter your News Feed by specific business pages or a combination of business pages and friends. Click on Interests from the left column of your News Feed, then Add Interests, Create List, and enter the people or pages you want on the list. Interest lists can be private, available to your friends, or public. They will filter your News Feed as a Friends list will when you click on the name of the list from the left column of your News Feed. If you are on a business page you can add that business to an existing Interest list or a new Interest list by clicking on Liked (beneath the cover photo) and selecting the option.
5. Manage friend updates. If you want to manage the updates from friends that you do see, go to their Timeline, click on Friends (under their cover photo). There you will find an option to show or not show their updates in your News Feed, and if you decide you do want to see their updates, you can select which updates to see. Does this guarantee you will see their updates in your News Feed? I would not bet on it but it will eliminate updates you wish not to see!
6. 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.
Once you start controlling your News Feed you may find you are on Facebook less and enjoying it more!
