[10 TIPS] To Tame Facebook

Ten Tools to Manage Your Facebook Feed

Here are ten ways to use tools built into Facebook to control what you see, who can send it to you and, to some extent, how often you see certain types of content. It’s dismaying that you have to actively “manage” all of this, but that’s a fact of life.

(1) - Two control options appear on a dropdown menu when you hover over “News Feed” on your Home page’s left sidebar. The “Default” way of displaying content on your News Feed is “Top Stories” -- essentially, the stories that Facebook wants you to see first. The alternative is “Most Recent,” which you must check off repeatedly because Facebook keeps switching you back to “Top Stories.”

(2) -Below “Top Stories vs. Most Recent” you’ll see the second News Feed control option concerning Notifications, those rectangular balloons that pop up in the lower-left corner of your screen and in the “Notifications” tab at the top-right of every Facebook page. “Turn off Notifications” is the default setting, mercifully; enable Notifications only if you really, really can’t afford to miss anything your friend or followed Page does.

(3) -Note that the Notifications toggles on this News Feed dropdown menu affect all notifications, not just those generated by a specific friend or Page. On a human friend’s Home page, hover over the “Friends” button to reveal the “Get Notifications” option on a dropdown menu. Check or uncheck it to toggle notifications from that friend on and off. On a Page, the “Liked” button reveals the options to get all or none of the notifications generated by the Page.

(4) -You might be frustrated because you're not seeing Facebook posts from people you really care about. When you make someone a friend on Facebook, you automatically "follow" them as well. But their posts still might be buried deep in your feed, or not show up at all. Here's how to fix that: Click the “Following” button on their page, and a dropdown menu will show you two control options. Select “See First” instead of “Default” and posts from that person will appear at (or at least near) the top of your feed.

(5) -In similar fashion, Facebook Pages for businesses and other non-human entities can be ignored or “liked.” If you click the “Like” button on a Page, a dropdown menu will show you the “See First” option. Select it, and posts from that Page will appear earlier in your News Feed than unprioritized Page posts.

More Options to Control What You See

(6) -If you write a post, a comment, or, a reply, you may or may not want to receive notification whenever someone replies to what you wrote. To set notifications on for a specific post, click on the down-arrow in its upper-right corner and “turn on notifications for this post” only.

(7) -Individual posts can be hidden from your view without affecting your Facebook relationships. You don’t have to block your best friend just because he posted one offensive message. Just look for the “down arrow head” at the upper-right corner of any post; it is deliberately greyed out and hard to see, but moving the cursor over that area of a post will reveal the arrow head. Click on the down-arrow to select “hide post,” and you’ll lose that post without losing a friend.

(8) -Other options on the same dropdown menu include “unfollow, but remain friends,” so you see nothing from a friend in your News Feed but can still enjoy the privileges of “friendship.”

(9) -“Save Post” is a fairly recent and very valuable feature on Facebook. It’s simply bookmarking a given post, just as you would save a bookmark to one of my articles. Click the down-arrow on the post’s upper-right corner and select “Save post” or “Save link.” The place to look for posts you have saved is in your Home page’s left sidebar, appropriately labeled, “Saved.”

(10) -You can search through all of your past posts using the Activity Log Search function. Start with the down-arrow icon in the upper-right corner of any Facebook screen. Click it to reveal a dropdown menu with many options; “Activity Log” is about halfway down the list. Click that label to open the Activity Log page. See the “Activity search” box in the upper-right part of the page? Don’t get your hopes up; Facebook’s search algorithm is not as good as Google’s, to put it politely.

These are only the major options available to control content in your News Feed. I could write a book about all of the options on the hidden dropdown menus mentioned throughout this article. Take some time to explore them and see how they can enrich your Facebook experience.