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[MissionIR]

How to "Force" Facebook to Show the RIGHT People Consistently in Your Feed

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Lifehacking is the process of using “hacks” (tricks) to make your life more efficient.

So today we’re going to do a little Facebook “hacking” to make the news feed be a little better behaved!

Recently, during a rather serious time, a regular reader of mine complained that Facebook did not show an important message from my Page, when it would have been useful!

Jeri Jensen wrote: “Aack, I did not see this from you. If you’ve got tips on how to actually keep people you’re interested in, in your feed, please post them. I [saw the info later] in a group I belong to. Hope you’re doing well, Kim!”

Hey Jeri, great question!

Getting control of the Facebook news feed is really a three step process…

First, use a browser add-on like FBPurity to remove stuff from the news feed that you don’t need to see. There are lots of options, lots of control, and you can even filter out keywords (useful for politics, etc.). That reduces the overall volume of stuff in the news feed and makes room for more of the right stuff.

Second, further reduce what is in the news feed by adding people that you rarely want to hear from to the Facebook default Acquaintances list. Doing this minimizes how many times they will show up in the feed and only shows them if a piece of content gets a lot of activity (implying you may need to know about it) or is a “life event” (like marriage).

That reduces the items in your news feed to make room for more good stuff.

Third, Facebook has another default list called “Close Friends”. Unfortunately, the Close Friends list is actually broken and does not currently work, but they’ll likely eventually fix it, so you may want to go ahead and add people you WANT to hear from whenever they post. This is sort of an “I don’t want to miss a thing” button (if it worked).

Fourth – and here’s where it get juicy – you have to know a little bit about Facebook Edgerank.

Which items you see from which individuals is based on a Facebook algorithm based on pages/friends you click like or bless with comments.

So the fastest way to force a page/profile back into your news feed is to visit it and like two dozen or more things.

Just like-like-like to tell FB you do want to see that stuff. Then, in the future, each time those individuals go down your newsfeed, click like. (This is why you often get a lot of likes from people that are “just passing by” and don’t comment… because they’re telling FB that yes, they want to keep seeing you.) Comments are “worth more weight” in this than likes are but it’s usually fastest to throw likes around.

If you notice that a friend has started to show up MISSING from your news feed, just go over to their page/profile and take a couple minutes to like-like-like all their stuff to tell FB that “yes I actually DO want to see this person”. (I recently had to do this when the algorithm got really confused and started hiding two of my best friends from my feed!)

And that is how you make Facebook’s algorithm obey you again!

Now you know a “Pro Level” Facebook hack! Have you ever had Facebook’s news feed do strange things with the stuff it shows you? What drives you nuts most often about it?

PS: This manipulation is to adjust the EdgeRank and alter what shows in the news feed. Additionally, on pages you can subscribe to NOTIFICATIONS of new content. And in the “Close Friends” list you can also subscribe to notifications of new stuff from all those Close Friends. Notifications are much more likely to show you EVERYTHING than the news feed is.