How to customize your Facebook newsfeed

1 in 5 of us are un-friending distant friends and acquaintances because we are annoyed by either the frequency or the content of their political posts on Facebook.

With more than 1 billion people now on Facebook, and an estimated 50% of them actively using the service daily, the amount of noise in your Newsfeed is only going to increase.

The solution? Customize your Newsfeed.

How? By using Facebook’s snazzy tool for creating Interest Lists.

You can browse and subscribe to lists that interest you (without finding the list creator), or you can custom build your own lists based on interests, family connections, past associations, etc. Once you create a list, simply add it to your Favorites at the top left side of your home page.

Here’s how to get started:

1:- From your homepage (not your timeline), look in the left-hand column (you may need to click “more”) and click “add interests”.
2:-Browse lists that appeal to you and click “subscribe”.

3:-Add the friends or pages (you can absolutely mix the two in your list creation) that you want to appear in this list. Click “next”.
4:-Give your list a name, identify the security setting you want (public, can be seen by friends, or available only to you), and voila, you’ve got your list.
5:- You can then “manage your list” and decide precisely what types of posts you want to see in your custom list feed.
6:- Your list will now appear in the far left column of your FB homepage and you can click it to ONLY see these posts in your newsfeed.
To make this even easier, hover your mouse over your list name in the left column of your FB homepage and you’ll see a little pencil icon appear. Click it and then click “add to favorites.” Now, your custom list appears at the TOP of your left-hand column. And there you go.

For those of us wanting to chase a long tail of interests, or who have a deep passion in a key area, or who really are only on FB to interact with our families, this tool may be just the thing for you. But be prepared, data from the same Pew Internet and American Life study also tells us that 36% of social network users are surprised by the political positions of even their closest friends. And in our view, a little diversity of thought is not necessarily a bad thing.

Happy LIKING, posting, commenting, and sharing.