How to reduce your Facebook updates
Tired of your Facebook news feed getting cluttered up with updates from people you don’t really know or care about?
A simple change can make a lot of difference.
It seems a little rude to ‘unfriend’ an old acquaintance even though you may not have spoken to them for 20 years, but you can control which friends take priority in your timeline.
By making someone a ‘Close Friend’, you’ll be able to see everything they post. Otherwise, Facebook will try to filter out uninteresting status updates from less important people.
The process is a little bit tricky, however, and not as straight forward or obvious as the ‘Circles’ feature on rival Google+.
1. In order to set a Close Friend, click on their name and then on the Friends button on their Timeline/Home page.
2. When you click on that button you should have the option to add them to your Close Friends or remove them. If you add them, you will see all of their updates, and those of their friends, but if you remove them, you will only see their updates if they are considered topical by Facebook or if you sort your News Feed by Most Recent.
3. Once you’ve been through your friends list and added Close Friends, you may find you’re still overwhelmed with updates. You can adjust how you receive notifications by going to your News Feed and on the left-hand side click on the Close Friends icon. This will now take you through to the page where all your Close Friends have been listed.
4. On the top right-hand side of the page you will see two buttons. One says Manage List and the other says Notifications. Click on Manage List and then remove all the updates you don’t want. But if you want to be notified about everyone’s status updates, keep that selected but deselect the rest.
5. Once you’re happy just move on to Notifications. This a quick and simple way of just turning off all the notifications highlighted in the list you just managed. Select Off if you don’t want any, On if you do.
6. To remove somebody from your list just go to Manage List and click on Edit. Then hover your mouse over their name and click on the X that appears on the top right of their image – they’ll be taken off the list and you’ll only hear from them when they have something important to say.
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