ContentedLife

Make an Interest List and add it to your sidebar Favourites

You may have seen the following message circulating on Facebook:

Due to Facebook’s new policy, only about 10% of people that ‘like’ a fan page will see the status updates.

In order to see my posts and notifications just click/hover over the ‘Liked’ button (beneath the cover photo, to the right) and activate the ‘show in news feed’ option.

This will allow you to see all of the posts.

Unfortunately that information is WRONG.

You will probably find that your Show in News Feed option is already active for the pages you like, unless you specifically switched it off. It does not guarantee that you will see the page’s updates in your feed. If you click this option you may be inadvertently switching it off!

Facebook decides which posts to show in your News Feed based on how often you “interact” with a Page’s posts – basically how often you hit Like, Comment, or Share on them. But regardless of how much you do that, it now shows Page posts far less often than it used to, because FB wants Page owners to pay for the privilege of having their posts seen (by people who have already asked to see them!)

If you’re a big fan of a particular Page, there is something you can do to help ensure that you don’t miss its posts – put it in your sidebar Favourites (or Favorites for US spellers). It’s a bit complicated, but here goes:

When you hover over the Liked button for a Page, you’ll see an option in that menu to create a New List. This creates what’s called an “Interest List”. As well as the currently selected Page, you can then also add to it any other Pages that you want to follow (such as Quextal 😉 ) – but I suggest not putting too many pages into one list, or Facebook might again intervene to decide which posts it shows in the list. Or you could just have one page per list, and create a new list for each page that you want in your sidebar, but there may be a limit to how many lists you can have in there.

So, choose which pages you want on this list (you can always add or remove pages from the list later if you change your mind), and click Next. You then have to choose a name for this list, and decide whether to make it public – that’s up to you, and it largely depends on whether you think it might be useful for other people. Making a list public shouldn’t infringe your personal privacy in any way.

When you finish creating the list, FB will show you the list page, hopefully full of posts by the Pages you selected.

Now go back to the main FB homepage. Your new list should be in the sidebar under INTERESTS (you might have to click MORE at the bottom of the sidebar to see this. If you hover over the name of the list you just created, a pencil icon appears to the left of it^[1]. Click that and select Add To Favourites (or Favorites if you’re using US English). This will (a) put it in your Favourites / Favorites section near the top of your sidebar, and (b) put a number next to it whenever there are new posts to read. To read them, just click on the name of the list.

• [1] Users of Matt Kruse’s excellent Social Fixer plugin may have to disable it temporarily to do this step.

Note that this probably has no effect on how likely a Page’s stories are to appear in your main News Feed, which will continue to be driven by Facebook’s desire to extort money from the Page owners. But at least you’ll be able to see in your sidebar when there are new posts to read.

You can subscribe to other people’s public Interest Lists. For example, here is my list of selected psybreaks artists and labels (it’s not meant to be exhaustive, so apologies to anyone I’ve left off).

I hope this is useful. Please share this article, especially where you see people sharing the wrong information quoted above, and add a comment if you notice any errors or have additional information.