Falling in love again...

 

...with your Facebook newsfeed

Do you remember a time, way back then, when you logged on to Facebook and saw lots of posts and updates to interest you and photos to ‘like’ and comment on?  When your newsfeed was chock full of news and not peppered with ‘Suggested Posts’, adverts, random updates from pages you don’t interact with on a regular basis and general non-news?

I have been struggling with my newsfeed for a long time now and have tried pretty much every tactic to shape it how I want it.  I toyed with ‘Interest Lists’ for a while but, with no way to get my custom newsfeed to display by default, or to add all my already liked pages to it easily, it became a bind to maintain and has now pretty much been left to grow wild.

I know first-hand how hard it is for Business Pages to reach their fans.  Posts on my page are lucky to appear in 30% of my fans’ newsfeeds with many of my updates barely attracting a like or comment.  So, when I realised that I was missing updates from some of my favourite pages (thanks to Facebook algorithms deciding what news I did and didn’t see), I decided it was time for action. 

Taking control from NOW!

Step 1 of reclaiming your newsfeed is to change your behaviour when you ‘like’ a new page.  When you hit that ‘Like’ button for the first time, take the extra step to tell Facebook how to keep you up-to-date.  You could choose the ‘Get Notifications’ option which will generate an entry in your notifications window every time the page posts.  This is great for your absolute favourite pages or for catching those posts where ‘time is of the essence’ and if you don’t react immediately, you’ll miss out.  However, if you choose this option for every page you like, your notifications will quickly become unmanageable and you’ll miss stuff anyway!

Instead, make sure the ‘Show in News Feed’ option is checked and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, adjust the settings for this by clicking on the ‘Settings’ menu item.  If you miss this step, the setting will default to ‘Most updates’ which effectively allows Facebook to decide what content to display in your feed – not what you want!

The bottom line is: If you want to see regular, unfiltered news on your feed from the page you have liked, you have to choose ‘All updates’.

 

Rediscovering lost pages

Step 2 of restoring your love for your newsfeed is about revisting the pages you have liked in the past to check the settings discussed above.  The advantage of this is that you can take the opportunity to have a ‘springclean’ and ‘downsize’ your newsfeed at the same time. 

You could traipse around Facebook, visiting each page in person but unless you have a few months to spare, this is not a practical approach and you will probably give up before the task is finished and be no closer to your newsfeed heaven.

A better way is to edit settings for all pages in one place.  You’ll need to have your ‘Likes’ section visible on your profile to do this.  If there is no likes section on your ‘About’ page, you can re-add it (temporarily if you wish) by clicking on the ‘Update info’ button on your cover photo, pressing the little edit symbol that appears on the right-hand side of the ‘About’ page and choosing the ‘Edit sections’ option.  Check the ‘Likes’ box and hit ‘Save’.

Now you have your ‘Likes’ section visible, click on the word Likes in large font.  Facebook will display a whole host of ‘Suggested Pages’ which you can simply ignore.    Click on the ‘more’ menu option and choose ‘Other likes’ to display the pages you have actually liked.

Now you can modify the update settings for each page by hovering on the page picture until the ‘Liked’ button appears and following the instructions described previously.

This process may take you a while but it’s worth it.  You’ll LOVE your newsfeed and the pages you liked will LOVE you for finding them again.

Have fun!