What can a Facebook List do for you?

[last updated August 2018]

Have you ever been annoyed about the selection of items that land in your News Feed? We know Facebook has algorithms that decide which posts to show you, based on how popular they are and other factors. Early on in the history of the Feed, I grew annoyed at missing things from good friends, just because their posts didn’t have loads of likes or comments or because I hadn’t talked to them recently.

Enter the List. Facebook has this option to help you organise your friends. You can make as many lists as you want - I have two main ones, one is tiny for when time is tight, the other a little larger.

How to start your list: From your main page, go down the left sidebar until you see the heading called Explore. Under that is an item called Friend Lists. Click on that, then on "Create List".

A window pops up for you to name your list and add people. Don't worry about remembering everyone, you can go back and change list members later (or just make a new list). Include all the people whose posts you never want to miss. When you’re done, click Create and the magic begins to happen.

Now you are redirected and will land on “on” the list page. Take a look at your browser’s address bar – that’s the list’s unique web address. Go ahead and bookmark that link, stick it on a button in your bookmarks bar…

Then, anytime you want to go to FB, just click that button and you’ll go straight to the most recent posts from your prioritised people.

It’s certainly very useful once you get more than a few hundred contacts. Inevitably, you’ll know some better than others, and be closer to some than others. Those not chosen can still interact with you on your posts, and there’s nothing stopping you from clicking through to the regular feed anytime you like.

I currently have about 200 people on the lists that I keep up with completely. That’s about as much as I can manage from day to day. To everyone else, I’m very sorry – but I far prefer this solution to unfriending you! I still want to keep you in my wider circles and maybe someday something deeper will spark.

Ah, but who is on this list of yours, I hear you ask?

Nope. That’s my secret!