originally posted on www.stopthinksocial.com on March 22nd 2011

Since my last post here on StopThinkSocial, I’ve noticed a significant change in Facebook that I wanted to share with you.

Back in September I shared with some tips on How to manage your Facebook News Feed. The Facebook News Feed as you may recall is your Facebook summary page, where you see a constantly updating stream of updates from your friends, groups and pages you ‘Like’.

In the September post I showed you how you could prevent certain types of updates appearing in your News Feed, and how you could increase the quantity of updates from certain friends.

Since that post Facebook have made some changes which I thought were worth sharing with you, given that it now makes my advice given in September redundant.

You will recall that there are two different ways of viewing your News Feed:

• Top News - aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting.  This uses an algorithm based on a few factors like how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update)
• Most Recent - shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time

You have always been able to manipulate the way in which content appears in the News Feed as outlined in my September post, however changes made recently by Facebook have altered the way in which you can do this.

You can now specify what posts you want to show.  Your options are either:

• Show posts from all of your friends and pages
• Show posts from friends and pages you interact with most

If you have a lot of Facebook friends and ‘Like’ a lot of pages, it might be a good idea to have the News Feed set to pick up posts from those you interact with most.  However if you are noticing that your News Feed is populated with updates from the same friends and pages and you want to widen the net, you should make sure you are setup to pick up posts from all friends and pages.

To make changes follow these steps:

1. Scroll to the bottom of your News Feed, and click on Edit Options:

2. You will get a pop-up window where you can Edit Your News Feed Settings:

3. Click on the drop down list Show post from:

4. Select the appropriate setting depending on what posts you want to view in your News Feed, and click Save:

Hope this information helps you…