Inside: How to Organize Your Friends List on Facebook.
Decluttering and organizing your home seems like an obvious thing to do but how often do you declutter your digital space? Your photos on your phone, emails you subscribe to and accounts you follow on social media – it all needs to be maintained and kept in check.
Organizing your friends on Facebook will ensure you don’t miss notifications for the friends you care about and don’t have your feed full of posts for people you don’t even remember following. Make use of lists and the unfollow feature to keep on top of it all.
Here is how I have decluttered and organized my Facebook friends to keep my account and mental wellbeing clear – only seeing wall posts that truly interest me and fill me with joy.
Decluttering your friends lists on Facebook
There are several ways to go about doing this, so just do whichever works for you and the time you have available.
The first option, and an easy way to do it, is to open up the app and scroll down your Facebook news feed looking at individual posts. If you find yourself wondering who someone is (please tell me I’m not the only person who forgets who people are!) or find yourself feeling irritated by someone, then you can do one of two things:
- Unfriend them completely
- Unfollow them
If you unfriend someone then you will no longer have them listed as a friend and it will also remove you from their friend list. Of course, for some people this is fine (especially if you can’t remember who they are) but for others it may cause awkwardness.
So, the alternative is to ‘unfollow’ them. Which, in the case of Facebook, simply means you will remain friends but they will no longer show up in your home feed.
That being said, there are a lot of scammers out there, so if you suspect someone in your friends list isn’t who they say they are, it would be better to use a free people search service to verify their details and take the necessary steps.
You can carry on auditing your home feed in this way and over time you will see less and less of what you don’t like and more and more of what you do like in your main news feed.
The second option and more efficient way to audit your friends list is to head to your full friends list and scroll down through all of your friends and choose whether to unfriend, unfollow or add to a list (see below for more on Facebook lists). You may want to do this in batches if you have quite a long list of friends to work through!
Facebook’s algorithm will try to show you more and more people to keep you in the app. It may start showing you people you barely remember or even posts from groups you forgot you joined. Simply go through the process for as long as it takes until you are completely happy with your account.
How to unfriend someone on Facebook
Annoyingly, there isn’t a quick way to unfriend someone from your home feed. Instead, you need to click on their name to head over to their personal feed.
Once you are there you can click on “friends” and then click to unfriend them. This cannot be undone so if you want to have them as a friend again you will have to send a brand new friend request.
If they are a regular viewer of your profile then they will be able to work out that you’ve unfriended them as they will no longer have access to your profile.
How to unfollow someone on Facebook
A gentler way to stop someone being so present in your feed is to unfollow them. When you scroll past someone you don’t want to have appear in your news feed anymore, simply press the 3 dots to the right of their post and click on “unfollow….”. You’ll remain friends but they just won’t show up in your feed anymore.
Alternatively you can choose to “snooze for 30 days” to give yourself a break from someone. If, after the 30 days are up, you find they are getting getting on your nerves again then you can unfollow them permanently (but still remain friends).
Note: The same can be done for pages you follow and groups that you are a part of. You get to choose who and what shows up in your home feed.
Organize your friends using lists
Facebooks automatically provides you with default lists when you first open up your account. These are:
- Close Friends
- Acquaintances
- Family
- Work (Listed by your work place names)
- School (Listed by your school names)
- Your area
- Restricted
When you become friends with someone, you can add them to one of these lists as a way of keeping tabs on who everyone is. Close friends will be given priority for status updates (basically seen as your top friends) over anyone else so bear this in mind when adding someone to a list. As yourself “how much do I want to see of this person?”
The work and school lists will be auto-populated by Facebook, filled with friends who also list those places on their profile.
Important note: Close friends, acquaintances and restricted lists are private. However, family, work and school are not and as a result, anyone you add or remove from that list will be notified of the action.
Creating your own lists
You may wish to create your own custom friends list – a great way to organize friends according to interests, how you met, and other criteria specific to you. These will remain private on your Facebook account, so you can create as many as you wish, with whatever criteria you wish.
To create a new friend list, head to left side of your profile page and click on ‘friends’. Head to “custom lists” where you’ll be able to see all of the current list options you have.
At the very bottom you’ll see “create list” where you can make your own custom list. Click to add a new list, give it a name and then click to add friends to that list. You can manually scroll down your friends list to add members or you can use the search bar to find specific people. Once you’re done, click save and that list will appear on the left hand side.
You can create interest lists, long-time facebook friends lists, professional contacts lists and more! You can add people to a restricted list if you’d rather they didn’t see too much. You can edit these lists at any point, just tap edit friend list while looking at that list and add or remove anyone as necessary.
Using your Facebook lists
Once you have organized all of your friends into lists, you can use those lists to keep better track of friends. However, annoyingly you can only access these lists from a desktop and not on the mobile app. But, if you can create these lists and show Facebook that you want to see more of certain people, they will hopefully prioritise them in your feed more.
Recent friends will show up more as the algorithm will assume you’ve become friends for a reason. Family and those in your ‘close friends list’ will also be shown top of the list more frequently as well as those who you interact with often.
You can also use lists to adjust your overall privacy settings so your content is shown to the people you wish to see it. In your privacy settings, head to the section you want to manage. You can change permissions from ‘public’ or ‘friends of friends’ to ‘only me’ or “friends except…” and choose the lists of people who you want to exclude from those permissions.
You need to think of your social media accounts as extensions of your home. Don’t let anyone in who you aren’t really friends with. Limit your interaction with people who bring you down. Spend more time with the people who raise you up.
Life is busy enough without having to have your mind filled with unnecessary clutter from social media, right?