Clean Up the Clutter from Your Facebook News Feed

In 2012, Facebook hit one billion active users. Facebook is the undisputed king of social media, but this does not mean that their subjects are happy. In a January 2013 study, online news site 24/7 Wall St. found Facebook to be one of America's top ten most hated companies. This study factors in customer and employee satisfaction, as well as stock performance.

Facebook's popularity may be contributing to the problem. One billion active users are posting status updates, while companies and organizations are using Facebook as the hot new marketing tool. As an endless amount of voices competes for your limited attention, your Facebook News Feed can become a very noisy place.

It would be different if all the post on your Facebook News Feed were interesting, but let's face it; sometimes your News Feed can be a waste of time with all the clutter that piles up. It doesn't have to be this way, what you see on your News Feed is based on algorithms and marketing. With just a little bit of adjusting to your Facebook account settings, you can determine what shows up on your News Feed. These personalized tweaks have the potential to make your Facebook visit an enjoyable social media experience.

Friend Management
The goal is to keep the meaningful post from your favorite friends, while weeding out the irrelevant updates from the dum dums. Through your friend's profile settings, you can filter out what posts you see without having to "unfriend" them. This will avoid hurt feelings in real life because they will not be notified of your filtering actions.

To take back your Facebook News Feed from your disagreeable friends, you will want to log on to Facebook and scroll down your News Feed as you would normally. Facebook's algorithm is poor to say the least; therefore, it should not be too long before you come across a post that really grinds your gears. If you would like to filter out your friend's future post like this from showing up on your News Feed then go to their profile page. Below their cover photo of something stupid, you will see a Friends text box. Click on this box and a drop down menu will appear, from this menu choose Settings. You can choose Only Important to display only their most popular post that have received a lot of comments, or you can boot them off your News Feed entirely by unselecting Show in News Feed.

By default, Facebook will show you Most Updates with all 7 different types of updates selected. From the same Settings menu you can also select how many of the 7 updates that you want to show up on your News Feed. This is a great way to filter out someone's game accomplishments while keeping a line open to hear about updates about their family.

Like Management
Just because you may have "Liked" a company or organization, does not mean that they should have free reign to spam your News Feed with advertisements. From the organization's profile page, you will want to go to the Like text box and either Unlike them or unselect Show in News Feed.

By managing your Likes and your Friends, your Facebook News Feed will be free from clutter and a much happier place to virtually socialize. As is the nature with any maintenance, the more that you stay on top of this, the less that you will have to deal with it in the future.

These are the two big Facebook housecleaning exercises. Do you know of any additional tips that will make Facebook less cluttered and more enjoyable? Please share with us your thoughts in the comments. Or better yet, share this blog article with a Facebook friend to help improve everybody's Facebook experience.