Sunday, September 11, 2011

See All Friends & Pages In Your Facebook News Feed -- For Real This Time


OK, so this post may not appear all that law-related . . . but I’ve received the same Facebook-related question from a couple different lawyer friends, so that’s enough for me to assume this is worth sharing!

You may or may not have noticed that not all your Facebook friends show up in your Facebook News Feed. Facebook’s default setting is to publish items from friends and pages you’ve recently interacted with. No one’s quite sure what that means exactly. Presumably, it has something to do with whether you’ve liked someone’s status, posted on someone’s wall, and so on – but it’s not clear what degree of interaction is required. There’s been a Facebook status floating around for quite a while about how to correct this, suggesting users address the issue through their account settings and asking users to copy and paste the setting to spread the word. I, too, copied and pasted this advice because common sense says it should have worked. But alas. Common sense has no place in the world of Facebook. A couple lawyer friends pointed out that this change in account settings didn’t appear to be working. The next time they’d log in, the settings went back to the “recently interacted” instead of “all.” So, I did a little investigating. Turns out, there’s a better way to make this change (at least until Facebook makes its next surreptitious change to our default privacy settings), by editing your News Feed settings specifically. So, if you’d like to see news from all your friends and pages, try this:

Go to your News Feed and click on “Most Recent” at the top of that page. You should see a little drop down box option; select “Edit Options” at the bottom of that drop-down list.

The default says it is showing posts from “Friends and pages you interact with the most.” Change that to “All of your friends and pages.”

I made the change and it made a huge difference in my News Feed!