Facebook Feature to Let Users Prioritize Pages to See First

Posted on July 9, 2015

Facebook announced a big upcoming change earlier today to its News Feed. Facebook will be allowing users to prioritize which people and Pages they want to show up at the top of their News Feed.

The News Feed is the stream of stories on Facebook that is based on the friends and Pages Facebook users follow. Facebook uses an algorithm to arrange the content in your News Feed. In the past the trend has been for Facebook to take more and more control of the arrangement of its users' News Feeds. Now, Facebook is finally ceding some of that control back to the user.

Re/code reports that you can select up to 30 friends or pages that you want to appear at the top of your News Feed. It is good to see Facebook giving users some control over the News Feed. Many users would like a completely unfiltered feed like you can get on Twitter but this is a good start. Facebook is coming to the logical conclusion that letting users choose what they want to see the most in their News Feed will keep them coming back more frequently.

Facebook told Re/code, "It sounds counterintuitive, but the worse we do on rankings, the more we make people try and scroll through, the more likely they are to just go away. If we show you the stuff you really really want first, you'll come back more often."

The update is available now on the iOS app. The "See First" feature has an image of a little crab holding a star. It will also be coming to Android and the desktop. Facebook has not yet given a date for the arrival of the "See First" feature on desktop and Android.