How to Keep Your Facebook News Feed Clean and Useful

Social media has become such an integral part of our lives, that these days, our mornings begin with a perusal of our various social networking sites and ends with a final look at our timeline and news feed.

Our Facebook and Twitter accounts are very dear to us and a majority of us spare at least a half hour browsing through our accounts. Our timeline or news feed gives us an outline of the happenings in the life of the people we follow or are friends with. We are also updated about various brands, pages, and activities that we engage with and the happenings around the globe.

Most of the time though, we come across a piece of information that is not required in our virtual lives. At the beginning, we hardly pay attention to it, but regret it when it comes back to bother us later. On Twitter, it’s easy to block or unfollow users that provide an irrelevant piece of information, but on Facebook it's an entirely different ball game, where we have to go through a large range of things to make our news feed look proper.

A Facebook newsfeed displays our likes, updates from the people we're following and from various other sources. The news feed keeps our virtual world sorted, but at times it becomes necessary to keep it clean.

Here are a few steps to follow in order to keep the Facebook news feed clean:

1) Recheck likes:

It has often been observed that many Facebook pages that you liked in the past have become a complete trauma today. These pages relate to day-to-day topics, quotes, religion, jobs, etc. Pages like these post all the unnecessary stuff which later clutters up your newsfeed and repeatedly tests your patience. Often, the pages that you've sincerely admired earlier, turn out to be a spam generator. They seep out unwanted information, irritating visuals, and nude celebrity pictures.

In order to have a clean news feed you first need to recheck the page likes. 'Unlike' any page that updates you with any kind of unwanted information or misguides you. To 'unlike' a page, locate the 'liked' icon just below the cover photo of the respective page. Click on it and select 'unlike'. If you have a particular page, that you would consider to be constantly updated about, then go to the liked button and click on 'Get notifications' or 'Show in news feed'.

2) Spamming groups:

Facebook groups were introduced to generate an interactive medium of learning and knowledge sharing. However, over the years, many of these groups have lost the objective. There are groups which are dead on a communication basis and are widely used for marketing the admin's brand. There are groups which have absolutely no regulation on their content, while there also exist groups with active interaction and a large number of members which still get heavily spammed.

If a group is not informative for you anymore, then leave it. Also leave those groups who don't communicate anymore. To leave a group, click the gear icon below the group's cover photo and select 'leave group'. If you wish to stay updated then select 'notifications' below the cover photos and do the needful.

3) Unfriend Irritating Friends:

We all have that one friend who irritates us, whose constant need to keep us updated about his life drives us crazy. This friend has a huge stream of photos, uncountable check-ins and unessential status updates. They don't have anything significant to share.

If you have such a friend, don't hesitate to unfriend them. It will not only let you breathe a sigh of relief, but will also create space on your news feed for other important things.

4) Make an interest list:

It is one of the best features provided by Facebook. If you don't have time to unlike those not-so-productive pages then you can create your own interest list and get updates on things that are important to you. You can even add a new page to your interest list. In order to create an interest list, look up the left bottom side of 'Home' page. Click on 'Interest'. A new page will appear, following which click on the 'create list' at top. Select the pages you wish to feature on your list. Click 'next' to select the audience and name of the list and you're good to go. You can even ask your friends to follow this list.

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