Easy Ways to Clean Up Your Facebook News Feed (And Keep it Wedding Friendly)

Is your Facebook newsfeed filled with wedding tips and inspiration? Is it too much? Perhaps overwhelming?

Facebook – in general – can be a huge distraction. Sometimes draining, sometimes irritating and it’s completely understandable why people would want to give it up.

On the other hand, Facebook is the best and easiest way to stay connected to the people and things we care about, especially all of the fun wedding stuff.

We can teach Facebook to show us only things we want to see. Facebook wants us to. We can very easily unfollow people, hide posts, block things and customize our feed.

I’m writing a number of posts on wedding planning and general life productivity because wedding planning is stressful enough. It requires a significant chunk of our time, so the more we can do to make our lives easier, the better. And the good news – it’s SUPER SIMPLE, I promise.

Are you in?

CLEANING UP YOUR FACEBOOK NEWS FEED

Right now, Facebook is showing you things it thinks you want to see based on your previous behavior and interactions – comments, likes, shares etc.

You need to tell it what you want to see, and what you want to hide.

1. GET RID OF STUFF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE

To the right of any status update, you’ll see a little arrow with a drop down menu of options. Use this to tell Facebook what you no longer want to see on your feed.

You’ll see the same options with your friends – you can hide their posts or unfollow them without having to “unfriend” them.

2. CHOOSE THE THINGS YOU WANT TO SEE

Manually create Close Friends lists (here) or choose to get notifications whenever your friends or a favorite wedding brand/community page shares an update. This way, more of the stuff you care about will appear on your feed (and once the wedding is over, you can unfollow these pages, should you choose). And on that note, continue to like, comment and share the things you really enjoy.

3. BLOCK THE DISTRACTIONS, IRRITATIONS & SPOILERS

Here are a few more options for getting rid of more distractions and annoyances:

Block annoying things (Facebook Setting): Block apps, app invites and event invites from certain people by adjusting a few settings (here):

Don’t Get Sucked in By The Articles, Videos & Links (Get Pocket App). Download Pocket as a browser extension, and on your mobile device. You can easily save all of the content you want to read to your account to access later from any device. All of those articles you see on Facebook that you normally click through on? Just pocket it and read it later.

Block Specific Subjects & Spoilers (Rather Extension for Chrome): Election time posts can be particularly aggravating. As are spoilers for sports or TV shows. Download Rather, a free Google Chrome extension that lets you block certain keywords from appearing in your feed.

There you have it – the easy way to clean up your Facebook account without quitting it completely.

And if you need one more reason to freshen up your feed, a study just came out claiming that the things we see on our Facebook news feed rubs off on how we express ourselves (negative things on or feed influences negative posts and vice versa), so in our crazy world of stress, work and life, the little things we can do to make our environments even a bit more more positive do make a difference.