Facebook Makes It Easier To Unfollow People & Pages In News Feed

As promised by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the townhall Q&A yesterday, Facebook is giving users more control over what they see on the social network.

The new News Feed controls will make it easier for people to unfollow people and pages and give clearer messaging to people who choose to hide a post.

Now users who click to hide a post will be able to indicate that they want to see less from the page or person, or go the more extreme unfollow route, “if you don’t want to see any of their stories in your News Feed,” Facebook product manager Greg Marra wrote in a blog post. “You can always visit News Feed settings to see everything you’ve unfollowed and have the option to re-follow them.”

The News Feed settings, which are accessible through the More button on the mobile app, have also been reworked to give users better tools adjust the dials. Marra explained:

News Feed settings will now show a list of the top people, Pages and Groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week. You can choose to sort by people, Pages or Groups posts, or see an overall summary. Unfollow any friend, Page or Group if you don’t want to see their stories in your News Feed. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and can choose to re-follow them at anytime.

Whether these changes will prove to be good news for marketers remains to be seen. Many will likely bristle at the idea of giving people easier ways to unfollow pages. But then if users are annoyed enough by a business’ updates to hide or unfollow a post, they are probably not the best prospects anyway.

And as Zuckerberg noted yesterday, Facebook is always going to favor the user experience over making sure businesses reach their customers.

“And in every decision that we make, we optimize for the first, for making it so that the people who we serve, who use Facebook, and who are reading News Feed get the very best experience that they can,” he said. “And that means that if a business is sharing content that’s going to be useful for them, then we’ll show that. But that means if the business is sharing content that isn’t going to be useful for them, we may not show that.”

Facebook said the new News Feed settings will be available starting today on desktop and mobile. The new feedback options will be available today on desktop, and coming to mobile in the coming weeks. Here’s a video demo of the changes:

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.