But the algorithm is far from ideal, and most people will miss hundreds of potentially interesting posts from people, simply because Facebook reckons you might not like it. Now, however, within your News Feed preferences you can tap on specific profiles to prioritize their posts first.
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The suggestions in the “discover new pages” menu are influenced by the pages you already like as well as those liked by people like you, and are meant to give users more ways to see the posts they are most interested in, Marra said.
After years of suggesting who we should add as friends, Facebook is finally helping us to cull and coordinate who appears in our News Feeds. Additionally, the preferences will also surface recommendations for new pages to follow. Facebook’s aware of this dilemma, and starting today, it’s giving you new, more easily accessible tools to control what’s in your feed – without unfollowing people. The first is entirely new to Facebook: you can now select pages and friends that will show up at the top of your news feed every time you load it up so you don’t miss updates you always want to see.
The new “see first” feature is part of a revamped batch of preference controls rolling out to Apple iOS users July 9 and to Android and desktop over the next several weeks. It makes it super easy for you to discover and connect to the artists, news outlets, and businesses you like. Your chosen friends and pages can now get top billing, so all the insightful commentary from your literary friends isn’t subsumed by the incoherent ranting of that dude you knew in high school but can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend. It uses all of Facebook’s data on your behavior and what people similar to you Like to recommend relevant Pages. Posts from accounts that have been prioritized will also include a star to remind you that you have opted-in to seeing more of their posts. The rest of your News Feed will flow normally below. In November, the company gave users the ability to edit news from a person or page. In other words, if you choose to see posts from Nike at the top of your feed, an advertiser won’t show you an ad because of that decision.
On the flip side, there’s also an area that lets you see everyone you’ve unfollowed and add them back into your feed.
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If that isn’t precaution enough, Facebook now makes it easy to unfollow him, so his updates won’t appear in your feeds. Have a change of heart? It retired its Timeline Views metric that measured how often people refreshed the Twitter feed, arguing that as the product improves, you find what you’re looking for faster and spend less time searching. Of course, Facebook will know.
