How to Use Your Facebook News Feed Filters

I was asked this question on my Saucy Social Media Facebook Page:

…and it got me thinking about how many people are continually confused by how Facebook change their News Feed algorithms and believe me they are not the only ones as often changes to these filters happen without warning.

So in an effort to make it clearer (for the moment lol) let’s have a look at the different ways you can change the filters and ensure you see more of your favorites. The answer I gave to this post is completely accurate however there are also lots of other ways to change your own filters.

So first thing you need to know is that your News Feed Wall is now more filtered than ever before, and Facebook want you to use the unfiltered ticker in place of your old wall. The Ticker is as I said unfiltered and ALL posts from everyone you have friended or Liked will be seen in an never ending list that flows past on your Home Wall. However to see more of your fav friends or Pages interacting more with certain pages or friends will help get them past the filters on your News Feed wall as Facebook are trying to help filter out some of the ‘noise’ we often complain about on our News Feed.

Next there are a few other ways you can filter your News Feed Wall and as you will see it is not difficult if you know where to look.

Your Facebook News Feed Sorting Tools

1. At the top of your News Feed you will first of all see the the word ‘Sort’ click here to change your filters from Top Stories to Most Recent and back again as needed.
2. On each post as you hover over the top right hand side you will see a tiny blue drop down arrow click here to see a list of options for each post. You can ‘Hide story’ from your News Feed; Report it as spam; or change how often you see this person or Pages posts in your News Feed from ‘All Updates to ‘Most’ or ;Only Important’ or you can choose to ‘Unsubscribe ‘ altogether. Now this option makes no sense to me as if you are going to unsubscribe you may as well Un-friend the person altogether.

Facebook Lists and ‘Interest’ Lists

The next couple of options you can use to filter your own Feed is via Lists, now there are also two versions of Facebook Lists there are the older Lists that have

always been available to users and adding your friends into applicable lists as you friend them is a great idea so that you don’t lost touch entirely and I have my friends divided into both locality lists and niche lists just so I can catch up with what’s happening more often. I even have a family list so that I don’t miss out on family posts too often.

These lists also allow you to invite your friend to events in a locality without going all the way through your entire friend list one at a time which can be very time consuming if you have a lot of friends. Your friends lists can be created on the go as you friend people or edited, deleted or added to via the link on the bottom left of your sidebar on the Home Page, if you cannot see it click More and then click More again once Friends appears.

Next there are the all new Interest Lists where you can create a list under an Interest or you can subscribe to someone else’s list, this idea has directly been stolen from the old Twitter lists which work the same way. As you can see here in this image, I have either created or subscribed to a few lists.

To find your Interest Lists look along the bottom of your left hand sidebar and click More and once you have either created or subscribed to a List or an Interest you can click on these lists and see only posts from the people or Pages you have added to these lists making it easy to see posts you may have missed without them.