This week Facebook has made a number of changes including changing the way information is displayed in your personal news feed. Updates are now displayed based on ‘Top Stories’ – Facebook identifies which are your ‘Top Stories’ based on your relationship to the author and how many comments the story has been given.
This can be useful, but runs the danger of you missing updates from people that you are really interested in, but perhaps don’t qualify (in Facebook’s eyes) as a top story.
The best thing to do, is to use Facebook Lists. Facebook lists are a very similar idea to Twitter Lists or Google + Circles as a way of grouping people that you want to ‘follow’ more actively. Facebook has provided 3 ‘smart lists’.
One of which could be particularly useful – a list of people who are geographically located near you. To use this list, you need to make sure that your profile is complete with home town and then it will identify everybody else with the same home town (or within a 10 mile radius). You can add people to the list manually or enlarge the radius.
If you click on the City List, all updates from people in that list will then be displayed.
You can then create lists or groups of people for your other friends. Clicking on the list will see updates from those friends.
I don’t spend loads of time each day on Facebook, so for me, it will be a good way of organising how I see updates from more of my contacts. I’m not sure how this will work for a business though – for a business update to be seen, there will be a greater need for engagement. Although Business Pages can be added to a list manually your updates are going to need more engagement to be seen as a Top Story.
What do you think of Lists? Are you going to spend the time grouping your contacts?