Looks like Facebook users will soon be able to control what they see in their news feed, Facebook said in a statement.
The statement said, "We are announcing even better tools for you to actively shape and improve the experience. We have redesigned and expanded Facebook's 'News Feed Preferences' to give you more control."
The subtle update to Facebook's much-criticized news feed is expected to bring to Facebook users more ways to control what they see in their news feed.
We know that ultimately you're the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you," product manager Jacob Frantz said in a statement, "and that is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see."
To try out the new feature, users on iOS can open "news feed preferences" and tap "prioritize" to see a list of friends and followed pages whose posts appear in their feed.
Selecting preferred friends puts a star above on their photos. Posts from those friends will then appear above the algorithmically ranked news feed, in their entirely.
Considering how news fee works now, this is without a doubt, a pretty significant change. 30 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook's home stream, which by all accounts is a pretty mysterious beast. That being said, most don't under its mechanisms or how to control it, NZHerald.com noted.
Based on the types of pages a Facebook user has liked in the past, they can discover new pages to get more of the stories they care about.
For those Facebook users who have friends that posts too often, flooding their news feed with annoying memes and baby pictures, the social network has a few ways they can keep them away from their news feed.
In order to unfollow someone from Facebook's new News Feed preference page, tap "Unfollow people to hide their posts."
Scroll through the list of friends and pages and tap pages or friends that they want to unfollow. Unfollowing a friend is not same as unfriending them. Unfollowing friends simply means that their posts will not be seen in news feed, but they still remain your Facebook friends.
Facebook users' news feed contain more than 1,500 stories every day, however Facebook algorithm determines and displays the most relevant 10 percent, Facebook says.
This implies that Facebook users are missing out on a lot of content, which they can change by switching their news feed view from Top Stories to Most Recent. This will show everything in chronological order.
According to another report from ABPLive, while this helps Facebook users to prioritize their News Feed, people who use Facebook as a marketing tool may suffer.
While the new control come in, users will be adding only a few of their favorite pages to the list which apparently means that only those stories that belong to a premier brand or public figure come up first in the News Feed at the cost of other Pages which eventually show up further down the feed.
That being said, the new controls can be very useful for regular users, while it may turn out to be disastrous for those people who use News Feed as a marketing tool.
