News Feed Cluttered with the Wrong Content? Here’s How I Fixed Mine
Peter Donnell / 8 years ago
Facebook News Feed
There’s no doubt about it, the Facebook news feed has become a lumbering and bloated mess, and more often than not you’ll be seeing the posts you don’t want to, and not the posts you do want to. I decided to play around with my settings and see if I can improve it, and so far, it seems to have worked pretty well. There’s no super secret system to this, it’s just literally about taking the time to take control of the content you wish to consume on Facebook.
How Many Pages?
As you can see in the image above, I like 425 pages, that can be people, brands, movies, games, you name it, it’s in there, and after a quick inspection, it’s mostly junk. There are dozens of pages in there I want to see more often yet never do, so much so that I forgot I liked them in the first place. I checked with a few friends and realised that while this may be an obvious solution for many people, few have actually bothered to maintain their Facebook clutter. Some users have 500+ and many have 1000+ liked pages!
Thousands of Likes!
Let’s take a look at a section of my likes (below). I like so much stuff that simply doesn’t matter to me anymore, either through hitting like on a competition or a promotion months, maybe even years ago, or things that I used to like but have since fallen out of interest with. Northcore, Vue cinema, Jack Black, Bill Plant Driving School, Origin Insider, Eternal Descent, the list goes on, I don’t care for those pages anymore, so they’ve got to go.
Time for a Clean Up
Getting this number down is key, with pages posting all day long, there’s only so much your feed will show you. If you don’t physically interact with them often enough, the pages you may love on Facebook won’t get shown. If you want to see more of a page, comment and like, or it may become a ghost in your news feed.
Simply hover your mouse over the “liked” box and select “unlike” and while this may take a while (it took me 45 minutes to go through all of them), the end result can be quite huge.
Watch out for junk too like the “Win It”, which if I remember correctly was a competition system, but each entry generated a new like. Look for white flag profile pictures too, they often represent deactivated pages or groups.
45 minutes later, I’ve got the number down to 161, admittedly higher than most people will need, but I follow a lot of brands due to the nature of my work.
Take Control of Your Ads
F5 your news feed and you’ll find you’ve cleared room for the pages you wanted to keep. I noticed an increase in ads (especially for pages I had just removed), be sure to click hide advert and select “not relevant” as the reason. You are going to get Facebook adverts, but take control of them until they actually become topical to your interest.
Another big space saver for the news feed is page blocking. If you have a lot of friends who share from common popular pages or groups that are of no interest to you, block those pages. Click the page name in the post.
Block It!
Go to “more” and select block page. Now when people you know like, share, or comment on this content, it’ll never crop up in your feed. Handy if your friends like sports, religion, politics and more that you don’t want to see.
So Many Friends, But Where Are They?
Why not create the ultimate friend’s list and even a pages list. My “ultimate” list has every friend on there. When I view this list, I get a 1:1 real-time list of all posts, much more like you would find on Twitter or even Facebook in years gone by.
First look down your left nav bar and find “FRIENDS”, here you’ll want to select “more”.
No hit the “Create List” button and give your list a name, now comes the tricky part. You need to enter EVERY name of your friends. This can be time-consuming, but if you just type “A” and tick all the ones that appear, then “B” and tick them all, then “C” and so on, you’ll quickly get through them all in no time.
When you want to view the list, click the list name in the left nav bar. You’ll suddenly realise just how many Facebook status posts you have been missing out. Damn you Facebook algorithms!
As a final tip, do you want to see all the posts from a certain friend, page, or even a group? Be sure to go to their profile (such as eTeknix) and select “See First.” The newest post will always be at the top of your news feed.
