Use This 30-Second Trick to Clean Up Your Facebook Feed
With tons of apps, shoppable ads and Facebook reactions, your Facebook feed can feel super chaotic — and that’s AFTER you’ve customized your feed and BEFORE it gets clogged up with overly personal posts from braggy couples and people you aren’t super close with anymore. Though streamlining your friends list can feel like a major undertaking, we recently discovered a really easy way to slowly clean things up over time. Save yourself hours of hassle and try this new tactic that’ll take 30 seconds a day, rather than going for an all-consuming mass purge.
The Birthday Trick
We first heard about the “birthday trick” from friends at a recent girls’ night and love how simple it is. To start streamlining your friends list (and significantly clean up your Facebook feed), check your list of birthdays each day. While you might hop over to a few people’s pages to wish them a special day (or send them a message using Facebook’s new birthday cam), people you don’t keep in touch with anymore become candidates for unfollowing or unfriending. We know, it sounds a little bit harsh, but it’s life! Here are more details and instructions for each option:
1. How to unfollow: If you’re not ready to sever social ties entirely, but don’t want to see someone’s posts regularly, choose to unfollow them by clicking their name on the right sidebar, hovering over their name in the pop-up and hovering again over the button that says “unfollow.” Click on it to set your following preference.
By unfollowing a friend, you’ll still be able to scope out their activity and news when you choose to, but won’t be forced into seeing it in your feed. This is a great option for former coworkers you like to keep up with every now and then or even high school friends who veered down a different path that you still like to keep tabs on.
2. How to unfriend: For those people you’re ready to unfriend, click on their name in the sidebar, hover over their name in the pop-up and again over the “friends” button at the bottom. From there, hit “unfriend.” Boom! So simple.
Repeat this 30-second exercise daily, and you’ll have a beautiful, customized and clutter-free feed before you know it.
Will you start cleaning up your feed with the birthday trick? Or would you rather sit down and do a mass FB friends cleanup? Tell us your plan on Twitter @BritandCo!
(Photo via Getty)