How to see my FB Page

In my previous post, I said that I set-up a Facebook Page for my blog and podcast, and that I’d post about how to follow that—or any page—on Facebook so that it shows up in your newsfeed. It’s not necessarily obvious, and it’s easy to miss out on seeing things we want to see.

The problem is that clicking “Like” on a Facebook Page doesn’t necessarily automatically make items posted to that page show up in our newsfeeds. The solution is, first, to click “Like”, then click on the “Liked” tab and you’ll get a drop down menu with three options, each of which has a specific function.

The top one is “Get Notifications”. Select this if you want to get notifications, however, be aware that if you have your Facebook set-up to send notifications by email or push-message to your cellphone, then every time the page publishes something, you’ll get an alert. You can adjust that in your Facebook settings.

The next item is “Following”. This was added sometime in the last year, and is the way to make sure you get updates from a page. It’s similar in function to selecting “Follow” for a person, but there are some differences.

You can Follow a person you’re not friends with, if they permit it, though you’ll only see what they post publicly. Many of us share only with Friends, which is my default. Posts on all non-personal Pages are, by definition, public.

The main difference is that you have to “Like” a Page before you can “Follow” it—it’s not automatic—but when you become a Friend on Facebook, you automatically Follow that person. However, you can turn that off, which is a good option for Friends who post too much, too frequently, or whose stuff you don’t want to see, but you don’t want to “Unfriend” them. Just go to the Friend’s page and click on the “Following” tab to turn that off, and you won’t see their posts in your news feed, but you can still interact with them in every other way, and they’ll still see what you post (assuming they haven’t unfollowed you…).

The next item, “Add to interests list…” is a way to filter Page content. There’s a similar function on Twitter, and the basic idea is to make it easier to see similar content in a single feed. Facebook’s is a bit complicated, though, and has some privacy implications if you allow everybody to Follow you.

The final item in that menu is “Unlike”, the way to stop seeing updates from a page, similar to “unfriending” a person. It’s something I’ve seldom used myself, and then usually because I accidentally “Liked” a page. Obviously no one would “Unlike” my page.

Now, this advice is accurate at the moment, but could change at any time. I last talked about seeing stuff from Pages in one’s Facebook newsfeed a year ago—almost to the day—and things have changed since then.

Even so, if you set-up the Pages you want to see in your newsfeed, they may continue to do so even if (well, when…) Facebook next changes the way it handles newsfeeds and the like.

Good luck!