How To: Customize your Facebook news feed preferences on Android

This handy tutorial helps you clean up your timeline

As some of you know, a recent update to the Facebook application for Android now gives users more control over their Facebook respective timelines. Specifically, Facebook allows the user to handpick who is shown at the top of their feed and who is quietly pushed to the background.  Indeed, it is possible to stay friends with somebody yet keep them from cluttering up your timeline with passive aggressive comments about ex boyfriends. More importantly, it ensures that you never miss a post from somebody important to you.

Although Facebook publicly announced the new feature, it isn’t overly obvious as to how to go about setting it up. Here’s a quick walkthrough of the options and how they can help you.

Let’s Go!

To get started, simply look for the icon at the top right of the Facebook app that has three horizontal lines. This icon that appears just to the right of your globe which represents your general notifications. Got it? Now, scroll down to the section marked as help and settings and look for the subheading of “News Feed Preferences”.

A variety of options

As you will see on this splash screen, Facebook lets you control and customize the news feed to your very liking. You will see three options, each of which gives you different, yet related, types of control over your timeline.

Prioritize

The first one, which is indicated by a star icon, lets you pick those whose posts you want to see every time you open the Facebook app. According to Facebook, you will always find these posts at the top of your news feed – regardless of who you follow or what your friends are doing.

Simply tap the name or picture of your contact and you will see the star icon overlay. Do this for each person you’d like to see every time out. Once you are satisfied with your settings simply go back by tapping the arrow in the upper left corner.

Unfollow

The second icon, “Unfollow people to hide their posts”, does exactly that. You can pick people or pages that you just don’t care enough to see their posts but still want to remain semi-connected. Maybe it’s somebody you don’t agree with their politics, or perhaps litters your feed with constant updates about what song they’re listening to. Whatever, we don’t care.

Do note that this is not an irrevocable process and does not unfriend you from the person. They will not see that you have done anything on your end. Everything stays the same in their eyes.

Reconnect

The smiley face icon allows you to reconnect with people who you may have previously already marked as unfollowed. Scrolling through here lets you see not only the people but also pages you stopped following at some point in the past.

It’s here that you can also look to see how long it has been since you started unfollowing. You may wish to use this as an opportunity to clean up your feet all together and go back and just simply unlike or unfriend those contacts.

All set!

There you have it, a nice and simple way to clean up your Facebook feed and get it into shape. The idea behind this, of course, is to deliver more engagement with the people that you care most about. Spend a few minutes pruning your setup and you’re likely to dip into Facebook more often.

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