I like Facebook. It has a lot of good and useful features. But it also has a lot of stuff I don’t want or need. There are a couple of tools I use to filter out all the garbage in Facebook so I don’t waste time on stuff I’m not interested in.
Anyone that’s on Facebook knows what I’m talking about. These days, you can’t hardly look at the news feed without having to wade through the latest thing that Donald Trump said. Or one of your friends post the results of a quiz that tells them which Disney “Frozen” character they are. Or there’s a “news” story about the Kardashians. All of this is of zero importance to me, but my Facebook news feed is cluttered with it all the time.
Here are the two ways I clean that up (both are free). The first one you might know about.
Tool #1 for Facebook news feed cleanup: Unfollow
I use this liberally. Every time you see someone post something in Facebook, there’s a link in the top right corner of their post. When you click it, you have a few options. It looks like this:
When you click “Unfollow” it just means that whatever that person posts in the future, you won’t see it. Two important factors here:
- You will still be Facebook friends with that person.
- That person will not know that you unfollowed them.
So it really is the perfect solution, if you have someone you’re friends with but they are constantly posting their high score in Mafia Wars, or their status is always about how great their new Amway business is, you can finally declare yourself free of all of that.
Personally, I am very liberal with the Unfollow option. I might give someone a second chance (based on how annoying they are, and how close our relationship is in real life). But it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to just Unfollow and filter someone right out of my news feed. Facebook is enough of a time waster already – there’s no point in having to see stuff I don’t want to see.
And I know the question that some people are already thinking – if a person is that annoying on Facebook, why not just unfriend them? Fair enough. For some people, unfriending is an option. In my case, I use Facebook as a marketing tool for my computer services and laptop sales. So even though I might not want to see what someone is posting, I do want them to see what I’m posting. So I keep them as a Facebook friend but unfollow.
Tool #2 for Facebook news feed cleanup: FilterFeed
This one is a browser extension. I just discovered it recently and I like how it works. Unfortunately, it is only available for the Chrome browser so if you use Firefox you’re out of luck (although there are other options for those browsers).
To get this, open Chrome and go here. You can install the extension into Chrome right from that page and it just takes a few seconds.
Once it is installed, go to Facebook. You’ll see up at the top there will be a an icon that looks like a funnel:
Now that you know it’s running, you have to decide – what do you NOT want to see in your Facebook news feed?
A good example at the moment might be Star Wars. Obviously the new movie is about to be released, and of course there are LOTS of conversations about it on Facebook. But you know you won’t be able to see it on opening night, so you definitely don’t want to accidentally read a Facebook post that reveals anything.
So you do a single left click on the Facebook FilterFeed funnel icon, and you type Star Wars and hit Enter.
You can enter lots of words (I don’t know if there is a limit). Just type the word and hit Enter, and you won’t see any posts that contain that word.
Maybe you get tired of all the political arguments. It’s so bad now especially, with the presidential election and all the campaigning and the televised debates. I get really sick of it. For something like that, you could enter all of the relevant names:
One thing you want to be careful about is to not enter a keyword that is too generic. In this case, it was probably a mistake to have just “Hillary” by itself. In politics, it’s obvious who that means but I also have some friends named Hillary and their posts would be blocked also.
And of course, the little “X” you see next to each name means you can remove that word from the filter whenever you want. But that list does look like a nice selection of things to not see any more.
The possible uses for this filter are endless. So whenever you find yourself scrolling past a bunch of junk in Facebook, don’t just stay frustrated – get rid of it for good!
