Main points
- Facebook users can customize their news feed, limit the searchability of their profile, control the audience of posts, and view their interaction history with other users.
- Facebook provides the ability to delete old comments, likes, and other activity through the activity log in your profile settings.
Five Facebook settings that will help you better control the social network / Unsplash / Solen Feyissa
Although Facebook is no longer the main social network for young people, billions of people continue to use it every month. Over the past 20 years, the platform has gained many features and settings that not all users are aware of. Some of them help you better control your feed, privacy, and your own data.
Over the years, Facebook has evolved from a simple social network into a large service with dozens of tools. Some of them are hidden in the settings or not obvious to users. Here are five useful life hacks that can make using the platform more convenient. This is what Lifehacker writes.
What life hacks will help you use Facebook more conveniently?
Customize your feed to see less unwanted content. Facebook's algorithm doesn't always accurately understand a user's interests. This can result in posts that aren't of interest to you, including a lot of auto-generated content.
To influence the algorithm, simply click the three dots in the upper right corner of any post. There are several options available: mark the content as uninteresting, temporarily mute posts from a specific author for 30 days, or hide the page or person completely.
There is also an option to do the opposite – select the “Interested” option so that the algorithm shows more similar publications.
Limit the ways people can find you on Facebook. The social network can sometimes bring you back to people from your past – former colleagues, acquaintances or relatives. Sometimes such contacts are unwanted, which is why Facebook allows you to limit the ways people can search for your profile.
To do this, open the profile menu in the upper right corner and go to Settings & privacy, then Privacy Center and Common privacy settings. In the Profile information section, you can change the settings for how people find your account.
Here you can prevent searches by phone number or email, disable the appearance of your profile in Internet search results, and decide whether messages from strangers will be sent to your main inbox.
Control who sees your posts. Not everyone knows that you can set the audience for your posts on Facebook individually for each post. When you create a post, a menu with the audience is displayed under your name – for example, Friends or Public.
By clicking on this menu, you can choose who will see the post. This can be all friends, individual people, or specific contact lists. You can also specify users from whom the post will be hidden.
Additionally, in the friends list, you can create your own contact groups via the Create List function. This allows you to quickly select an audience for future publications.
View your friendship history with a person. Facebook stores a lot of shared content between friends. There is a special feature that allows you to see your interaction history with a specific person.
According to PCmag , to do this, you need to open your friend's profile, click on the three dots on the right, and select See friendship. This will open a page with shared photos, posts, and events you both participated in.
If users actively use Facebook, such a page can become a kind of archive of shared memories.
Delete old comments, likes, and other activity. Sometimes users regret a comment or reaction they left years ago. Facebook has a centralized activity log that collects all account activity.
To open it, you need to click on your profile photo, go to Settings & privacy, and select Activity log. Here you can see all comments, likes, posts, and searches.
This section allows you to delete old comments, reactions, or even your own posts. This way, you can clear your activity history on the social network.