Since its inception in 2006, the Facebook News Feed has undergone a lot of drastic changes. The fact that you can see your friend’s status updates, pictures, videos and connect with brands all in a single news feed is at the heart of the Facebook experience. The News Feed aims to show you the stories that matter the most to you, determined by Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm. However, sometimes things can go awry and you may not see the posts you actually intend to see in your Facebook News Feed. Fortunately enough, you have a fair amount of control over what you see in your News Feed — ranging from inbuilt customization options to various third-party solutions. So, today I’ll show you how you can tweak the Facebook News Feed to see relevant posts:
Use Facebook News Feed Preferences
The Facebook News Feed Preferences pane provides you with a few options to personalize what goes to your news feed. To access News Feed preferences, click on the three horizontal dots beside “News Feed” in the left pane and click on “Edit Preferences“.
If you’re using the mobile app, go to the “More” tab and tap on “Settings” > “News Feed Preferences“.
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Change Priority of People in News Feed
The first option in the News Feed Preferences page is “Prioritize who to see first“, allows you to select friends whose posts will always appear at the top of your News Feed. You should select the friends you don’t want to miss any stories from and then click “Done“.
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Hide Posts of Specific People from News Feed
The second option, “Unfollow people to hide their posts“, allows you to unfollow people, so that their posts will no longer appear in your News Feed. After unfollowing, you’ll still remain friends with them and they won’t be notified that you unfollowed them. Select that annoying co-worker who posts pictures of his daily meals here and click “Done“.
There are a couple of more options — to discover new pages to like and reconnect with already followed people. But If you’re looking to reduce clutter from your News Feed, you do not want to change these settings for now.
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Tweak News Feed While Browsing
Apart from the aforementioned options, you can tweak some News Feed preferences while you are browsing the News Feed, on the go. For instance, if you do not wish to see a post, you can just click on the little down arrow on the right side of the post and click “Hide post“. Facebook will make sure that it shows you fewer posts like that.
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Unlike Pages You Don’t Want Posts From
We are all guilty of liking pages berserkly in the early days of Facebook. Let’s cut the number of posts by pages in your News Feed. Click on your profile name, hover over the “More” tab and click on “Likes“. Here you can Unlike the pages you no longer want to see posts from (Beebom publishes some cool things on Facebook, so I hope you stay connected with us, though!).
Hide Posts by Specific Image Type
In this section, I’ll introduce you to a pretty powerful browser extension for Facebook — FB Purity. It is available as a free download for all the major web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
FB Purity has dozens of options to customize the Facebook News Feed, but for this part, we’re going to focus on how to hide specific images from News Feed. While I admit enjoying memes, I certainly do not want my Facebook News Feed to be taken over by them. Say, maybe you do not want to see a specific type of image like baby pictures or cat pictures, FB Purity has got you covered.
Once you’ve installed FB Purity browser extension, you should see a “FBP” option appearing beside your profile name on the top navigation bar. Click on it.
Next, click on “Photo stories“. Here, you can see “Hide Image Based on Their Contents“. Here, you can check any of the categories you find annoying or better yet, manually type in the image subject to hide all the images from that category and click on “Save and close“.
It uses Facebook’s very own AI for image recognition so it should work pretty well. Notice how it filters out images of specific type and describes the matching filter below it. If you are wondering how to access filtered out images, click on “Show” besides the extra at the top of your News Feed.
Hide Posts Containing a Specific Word
How do you maintain your sanity while being constantly bombarded with political posts all over your News Feed? Or that infuriating friend of yours, who always posts the latest Game of Thrones spoilers? Enter FB Purity’s Text Filter, wherein you can hide posts which contain a specific word.
Click on the “FBP” option next to your profile name on the top navigation bar. Below Text Filter, you will see a large text entry field. Here you can type all the words that you wish to filter from your News Feed, each on a new line and press “Save and Close” when you’re done.
It also supports regular expressions, so you can mix and match words to your own creativity. Their support site has a nice little guide on setting up custom text filters. Here is an example of text filtering in action when I chose to filter out all the posts containing the word “Love” —
Notice how the post is hidden from my regular News Feed and accompanied by the reason why it was hidden, which in this case is “Text filter Match – love“.Again, If you are wondering how to access filtered out images, click on “Show” besides the extra at the top of your News Feed.
Hide Other Specific Types of Posts
These days all kinds of posts or stories appear in the News Feed — pictures, videos, check-ins, life events, shared memories and a whole lot more. FB Purity allows you to filter almost any kind of story from your News Feed. Not a fan of seeing check-ins from people when they’re out on a trip? You can hide just that. Open FBP and click on “Various story types“. It literally has every story type listed that Facebook currently has. Just put a check on the story type you want to hide and click on “Save and Close“.
An important thing to remember is that the FB Purity’s scope is limited to the browser on which it is installed. And since extensions do not work on mobile browsers, it means that you cannot customize your News Feed using FB Purity if you primarily access Facebook through the mobile app or a mobile browser. While accessing Facebook from the mobile app or mobile browser, your best bet would be to personalize your News Feed using the built-in options that Facebook provides.
SEE ALSO: Facebook’s Official Android App Draining Battery? Top 4 Alternatives to Use
Take Control of YourFacebook News Feed Using These Tips
Using these default options and third-party browser extensions, you can take your Facebook experience to a whole new level by decluttering your News Feed. If you’ve some other tips on how to personalize the Facebook News Feed to show only relevant posts, do share with our fellow readers in the comments section below.
