Facebook changed its algorithm a while ago so that you see more posts from friends and family in your timeline and less from companies or pages you follow. However, you can do more yourself to adjust your timeline completely to your liking. This is how you adjust your Facebook timeline to mainly see posts from friends and family.
Facebook has seen the light. Posts from friends were previously buried under messages from companies and news sites. In this way, there was less and less interaction on the social network. To turn that tide, the company's algorithms will now prioritize messages from friends and messages from companies are shown further down the overview. This also applies to videos.
The underlying system looks, among other things, at status updates that provoke a lot of reactions within your circle of friends, and puts these types of messages higher in your timeline. You are still very dependent on a computer-controlled selection. You can also do a few things yourself to clean up your timeline, so that you see more posts that actually interest you.
Messages from friends at the top
For example, you can set that you are the first posts in your feed from certain friends and family members. To do this, click on the triangle at the top right of the main Facebook page, and choose News Feed Preferences. Then select Indicate who you want to see the first posts from. You will see a list of all your Facebook contacts, not only from friends but also from Pages you like. You can select more than one, and then click Finished. Facebook is now taking this into account and will place messages from these people and pages higher in the overview from now on.
In this menu you will also find the option Unfollow people to hide their posts. It works in the same way as the above option, but ensures that you no longer see messages from certain people. Don't worry, others don't know this and you just remain Facebook friends with each other. You can always revert this later with the option Reconnect with people you unfollow.
Make a friends list
If you find that you miss messages from friends quite often, consider adding them to a friends list. This list collects posts from the people in this list. In the menu bar on the left you will find: Explore the option Friends lists. You can choose one for here Create list, or select the already existing list Good friends. Then add the people you want to keep informed about here.
Tip: When you use such a list, you can also indicate with your own posts whether you want to post them publicly, or that only the people from your friends list will see your posts.
From now on you will also receive a separate notification as soon as someone on this list posts something on Facebook. Handy if you don't want to miss anything, but annoying if you constantly receive notifications. You can turn this off under Institutions, notifications, On Facebook, Best Friends Activities.
Hide disruptive messages from friends
Not only status updates from friends, but also posts they like, comments they post or posts they share are shared with you. But that information is not always of interest to you. Facebook gives you several options to hide these types of posts.
As soon as you encounter one, press the three balls in the top right. click on Hide message if it's just about that one post, or Hide all from [page x] when you are tired of certain messages. There is also a golden mean: [Snooze page x for 30 days].
Clean up pages
It also doesn't hurt to clean up your favorite pages. Do you still like certain bands or television shows and still want posts from those pages on your timeline? By clicking on this link you will get an overview of the pages you have liked. If there are pages that you no longer find interesting, it pays to click the button you like thisto push. This way you will unfollow the page and you will no longer see messages from this page on your timeline.
If you follow all the tips in this article, you will have a nice clean timeline again!
