When spending time on Facebook most people are used to seeing the same types of ads and shares throughout their news feed day after day. In order to minimize ‘content fatigue’ for its users, Facebook is putting in a change that will allow members to directly impact what types of things they see in a more proactive way.
Today you can click on a post within your news feed and tell it that you don’t want to see it any longer. With the update, however, Facebook will start asking why you don’t want to see it any longer, and then further customize your news feed based on your answers.
When the update has rolled out to your feed, you’ll be given the following options when filtering out content:
- It’s Not Relevant to Me – Select this option for ads or posts that you are just not interested in because it doesn’t apply to you. For example, if you don’t play social games like Farmville 2, you can select this option so you’ll be shown fewer (or none at all) messages from this type of app.
- I Keep Seeing This – Even the funniest videos get old over time. If all your Facebook friends keep posting the same viral video, you can now select this option so you won’t see it again.
- It’s Offensive or Inappropriate – Select this option to get rid of all those posts people make that you find offensive. This works on both ads and private posts!
- It’s Spam – The ‘click bait’ that is plaguing Facebook is being reduced already, but now you can indicate that other things are spam too so that Facebook can ‘learn’ not to show them to you.
While it will take some time, if you keep up on flagging posts that you don’t want to see, you will be able to dramatically improve the types of posts that make it to your news feed. This is also important information for marketers to keep in mind, since now their viewers will have one more way to limit or eliminate their interactions with your posts.
