How to Customize Your Facebook News Feed to Maximize Productivity

How to Customize Your Facebook News Feed to Maximize Productivity

Author: Alfred Lua / Source: Entrepreneur Facebook is still the leading platform for marketers. From our State of Social Media 2016 repor

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Facebook is still the leading platform for marketers. From our State of Social Media 2016 report, we found that 93 percent of marketers are actively using Facebook for their business.

As social media marketers, we spend a lot of time on Facebook, managing our Pages, engaging our fans, finding good content and creating ads.

In this post, I’d love to go through some of the lesser-known ways of customizing your Facebook News Feed to help you cut through the clutter, save time and be more efficient.

Let’s jump right in.

4 key areas of your Facebook News Feed to customize (and how to customize them)

For easy reference, here are the few sections we’ll cover in this post:

1. News Feed

Set your preferences

The News Feed is where we get most of the content and information on Facebook. With a few quick customizations, we can ensure that we see the most relevant and useful posts.

Facebook has made it really easy to set your preferences for your News Feed. To edit your News Feed Preferences, click on the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page and select “News Feed Preferences”:

Alternatively, click on the three dots beside “News Feed” on the left sidebar and select “Edit Preferences”:

In there, you will be able to adjust a few preferences:

  • Prioritize who to see first: This allows you to choose whose posts would always appear at the top of your News Feed. You can select up to 30 people or Pages to see first, and they won’t be ranked (ie. your second selection wouldn’t be seen second). In this window, Facebook shows your friends first. If you want to select Pages to see first, click on “All” and select “Pages only”.
  • Unfollow people to hide their posts: This allows you to choose whose posts you want to stop seeing on your News Feed. You can filter by “Friends only,” “Pages only” or “Groups only.” Only you will know who you have chosen to unfollow.
  • Reconnect with people you unfollowed: This allows you to follow a person, Page or group that you unfollowed in the past. While checking this setting, I noticed I accidentally unfollowed a friend previously. So it might be worth checking this setting even if you might not have wanted to unfollow anyone.
  • Discover Pages that match your interests: To help you add more variety to your News Feed, Facebook also suggests some Pages you might like.
  • See more options: This section includes things like the apps you have previously chosen to hide from your News Feed.

Leverage notifications

Taking it a step further, you can even be notified whenever your favorite Facebook Page post something. Facebook gives you the option to choose the types of posts you want to be notified about.

Go to the Facebook Page, hover over the “Following” tab, and click on the pen icon beside “Notifications.”

In there, you can adjust the notifications for the Page’s posts, events and live videos.
See most recent stories first

Facebook’s algorithm by default shows you the top stories from your friends, Pages you liked and groups you are in, at the top of your News Feed. If you want to see the stories in the order they were posted, click on the three dots to the right of “News Feed” on the left sidebar and select “Most Recent.”

Your News Feed will automatically return to the default Top Stories setting when you visit your Facebook homepage again.

Teach Facebook’s algorithm your preferences

You can also “teach” Facebook’s Algorithm to stop showing things you don’t want to see so that it will show you what you want to see. This is a bit more manual and tedious but it allows you to curate the best content on your News Feed.

Whenever you see a type of post you want to stop seeing or see less of, click on the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of the post and you will see these options:

You can do the same for ads, too:

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