Facebook is giving users even more control over what appears in their News Feed, as the social network looks to further boost engagement on its site.
In the latest change, users will now be able to choose which other Facebook users or brand pages appear first in their feed, while also having the option to reconnect with pages or users whose updates they have previously unfollowed.
Within news feed preferences, clicking on the profile picture of a page or friend will mean they appear at the top of the feed, accompanied by a blue star. The rest of the feed will appear as standard.
It will also be possible to unfollow people, pages and groups you do not want to see in the news feed.
Users can now set their preferences to select which pages and friends they want to see first, find new pages to connect to, and select which friends and pages to follow or unfollow.
The new preferences are available for those using Facebook on iOS while Android and desktop will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Users need to tap ‘More’ in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to enter the News Feed Preferences via Settings.
In a blog post to announce the changes Facebook’s product manager Jacob Frantz wrote: “We use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.
“Today we are announcing even better tools for you to actively shape and improve the experience. We’ve redesigned and expanded Facebook’s news feed preferences to give you more control.”
There is also a feature to discover new pages of business, organisations and publishers people might be interested in following.
To get to the news feed preferences tab, press “more” in the bottom right hand corner of Facebook’s mobile app. The news settings are under “settings”.
The changes are available today on Apple’s iOS and will be coming to Google’s Android and desktop soon.