The Newsfeed is where Facebook users view stories from the people they friended or pages they liked and complex Facebook algorithms place updates on top of your newsfeed judging from the interaction between you & the people engaged.
Now, Facebook has announced new ways to control what you see in your Newsfeed. In 2014, they had added tools like Quick unfollow & refollow people, and ways to give feedback about your news feed. In this new wave of changes, they have added selection of friends & pages to see first, finding new pages to connect to and an update to the unfollow tool.
Selecting friends and pages
Facebook now makes it easier not to miss posts from friends or pages of your choosing so that these posts come at the top of your Newsfeed. To set this, you have to go to the News Feed Preferences in the settings menu which brings a curated list of your friend’s avatars. You then can select the friends which leaves a star on their avatar. These selected friends will later on be at the top of your Newsfeed list the next time you log in.
Connecting to Pages
You may want to interact better with some pages due to the fact they have content you are interested in. This tool will help you discover new pages basing on data of your previous page likes.
Selecting which pages or friends to follow or unfollow
Facebook updated this tool which was introduced earlier where in the new update, there is a new design where you can see a list of the top people or pages you’ve been seeing over time. You can then proceed to unfollow them or if you had unfollowed them in the past, you can re-follow them.
This update is welcome since it will help trim posts that you see in your feed. We’ve seen such control on specialized reading apps like Flipboard where you can choose which content you’d like to see displayed on your “board”. Facebook seems to be aiming for this by making people have control of what they want to see and not what the clever algorithms think they’d like to see.
Currently, the updated changes are only available on iOS but the company says the changes will be rolled out on Android and on the web in the coming weeks.
