Pruning the Pages on Facebook

Some time ago, I wrote about how to prune the pages you like on Facebook, but the method has completely changed now so here's the new way to do it.

Why would you want to reduce the number of pages you follow? Well, if you keep on liking new pages in order to enter competitions, you can end up following several thousand  pages - and that means you hardly ever see anything that any of them says. So it's a good idea to go through them from time to time and unlike the ones you are no longer interested in. Then when you look at your  Pages Feed, it won't take you too long to scroll through all the updates from the pages you follow, and you won't miss news, great offers, new competitions or even an announcement that YOU have won one of their competitions!

However visiting each page individually to unlike it could take a VERY long time, so here is a quicker way to do it.

To start unliking pages, go to your home page - the one with your cover photo on it - and underneath the cover photo you will see the words

Timeline       About      Friends     Photos     More

Hover the cursor over "More" and a menu will drop down - choose "Likes" from this and all the pages you like will be listed, each as a separate square. For each one, hover the cursor over the top right hand corner of the square and the "Liked" button appears. Hovering over this will bring up a menu with "unlike" at the bottom. Click on that and you've unliked the page - job done. It can take a long time to go through all the pages you've liked, but you don't need to do it all in one go. And don't worry about unliking too many pages - if you realise that you've unliked one you didn't want to, it's easy enough just to go back to the page and like them again.

To help you to choose which pages to unlike, it's worth remembering that the ones you've liked most recently appear at the top, so the further down the list you go, the more likely you are to have lost interest in the page. Some of the oldest pages, at the bottom of the list, may not even be active any more. While sorting out my own likes, I found a whole cluster of them that had been set up for a particular competition, three years ago! If you are unsure about a page, and want to check whether you still want to like it or not, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the name. That way it will open up in a new tab and you don't need  to worry about losing your place on your Likes list when you go to take a look at it.

This same little menu on each page's square gives you other options too - you can select "show in news feed" if you want to see that page's updates in your own news feed rather than just your pages feed, and you can select "Add to interest lists" if that page is one connected, for instance, to one of your hobbies, or one that sells a particular kind of product. If you want to keep an eye on the updates from a particular page, yet don't them appearing in your news or pages feeds, adding them to a list and then unliking them means that you just need to look at your list to see what's going on there.

However there's one page I hope you WON'T unlike, and that's Grape Vine's very own brand new page!