Your Facebook Feed - What You Need To Know
I met a woman I'll call Sally about a year ago. She is a customer of mine and only used Facebook minimally. She wanted to grow her business and realized she really needed to have a Facebook page and more knowledge of using Facebook herself.
It really helped me to understand how non-bloggers and non-marketers use Facebook. They may look for photos of family members and post rarely themselves. They use it as a personal news source.
It's more of a communications necessity vs. using it as a marketing tool or as a business.
As Sally and I went over how to use Facebook she had no idea how lists worked or why even to create them and use them. I went on to explain that her family members might not want to see her postings related to her real estate business. Or her real estate customers may not want to see pictures of her with friends vacationing, etc. She was getting excited!
How to Use Facebook Lists
You can create lists out of your Facebook friends so that you don't share everything to everyone. You can share to these lists. You can also create "interest" lists. Things that you are interested in and use the lists likewise. It's also a great way to see what people in your lists post. You can go to your list and see just that feed instead of your mainstream Facebook Feed. It can save you a lot of time. (Just as Twitter lists do!)
Close Friends - When you make someone a close friend you will see their posts in your feed almost every time and in your notifications. Sally really liked this feature and wondered why she hadn't been seeing some of her friends posts. She would see them in person and they would ask her if she saw about this or that on Facebook. She was dumbfounded.
Acquaintances - When you don't want to see someone's every post, this is a great option. You know the person who shares everything with everyone? You no longer have to see it all. Nice!
Restricted Friends - This is for people like your parents, kids, bosses that you want to be friends with but don't want them seeing your posts. A little sneaky but it works.
Other Ways to Change Your Facebook Feed
Did you know you could change whose posts and pages you see first? You can choose up to 30 pages and people whose posts you will see first in See First Option - your Facebook feed above all the others. See the Slideshare below for more details. This is a great way to see posts from pages that tend to get lost in your Facebook feed. Sally may use this one for her new Facebook Page so her fans can see all of her posts.
Notifications - If you don't click turn on notifications you won't see them in your notifications. That's usually what I look at first. And if you set your mobile to make a noise or vibration you will be notified instantly. You may want to be extremely selective in which you choose to use notifications. Notifications can get annoying if you have too many.
Click on Posts - If you are seeing posts that don't interest you - you have an option. You can click on the right side of them and see the selection of choices. Some choices include: Hide Post, Unfollow XYZ, Hide All From XYZ, or turn ON notifications.
Story Preferences - You can change what you see from people with this option. You can customize by life events, photos, games, etc. Nice if you want to avoid seeing games that your friends are playing and yet want to see their new photo updates.
You really can have more control of your Facebook Feed and save yourself valuable time when on Facebook. These options are available on desktop and mobile as well.
Facebook Algorithm Changes
There are over 1.5 billion people now using Facebook. Facebook has over the years had to change the ways in which people view their Facebook feeds. An average Facebook user looks at 300 posts per day. It would really be impossible to see everything everyone posted. Even if you had a just a few friends and liked several pages. There are now sponsored posts and related posts. There are over 100,000 different factors now that play into the Facebook Algorithm. A few top ones to take note of are:
- Engagement - If you comment on a friends post or a pages post you will more likely see more from them.
- Relevancy - If topics are relevant to what you post about, etc you may see their posts more often.
- Sharing - If a post is shared by you, you may see more posts from that person or page.
- Time - How much time one spends reading a post is also a factor in your Facebook feed. The more time you spend reading one, the more likely you will see more like it in the future in your Facebook feed.
- Liking a Post - Likes have decreased in value over time but are still a small factor.
- Hiding a Post - This will likely show you less from that person or page in the future on your Facebook feed.
- Links - How you post a link may also impact how many people see it. It's best if you can start with a comment about it, share the link url and image. Uploading your own image sometimes helps too, especially if it is larger than one from the website. If you are sharing a link it is best to use the link preview format. If you are sharing just a photo it's best not to post a link within a caption.
Of course this may all change the next time Facebook makes changes to it's algorithm. They have become more like Google with constant changes of how we view things online and how one can get their links and stories shared across the web.
Do you use Lists often when sharing? What is your favorite thing about your Facebook feed that you can customize? What other advice would you have for Sally?Top Image courtesy of arztsamui at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
