Tips to See More Friends Posts on Facebook

Why am I not seeing friends posts on Facebook?

If you’re asking this question and wondering why Facebook isn’t showing posts from all of your friends, you’re not alone.

Believe it or not, this actually isn’t a bug. It’s just the way that the Facebook algorithm works.

In fact, in a recently published article regarding the News Feed, Facebook stated almost exactly that:

“What you see in your Feed is uniquely personalized to your interests through machine learning.”

Facebook

Facebook isn’t really giving the option here. They’re saying, if you use the Feed, we’re going to decide what you see.

When you’re enjoying what you see and don’t feel like you’re missing out, that works great. It is frustrating, however, when you realize you’ve only been seeing posts from 10 of your 500 friends for the last year.

This article, and the video above, discuss why this happens on Facebook and provide tips and strategies that you can use to clean up your Facebook Feed and see posts from more friends.

Why Doesn’t Facebook Show Posts From All Friends?

Facebook shows you posts from friends that you’ve interacted with the most and more recently. Essentially, they want you to stay on Facebook longer so they show you posts from people that they think will maximize your session time.

At the start, this may actually seem nice because you may enjoy most of the posts that Facebook serves you. Over time, however, you may realize that you’re missing out on a lot of updates.

Since the algorithm takes into account who you’ve interacted with most recently, you end up interacting with those people even more. This snowballs the algorithm’s effect until you’re only seeing posts from a handful of your favorite friends.

This becomes repetitive, boring and creates small echo chambers without the user even realizing it.

Is There Any Way To See Posts From More Friends?

There are a few things you can do to lessen the effect of the Facebook’s rogue algorithm. One potential remedy is to adjust some settings to begin seeing posts from a more varied group of friends.

Additionally, you can begin to “trick the algorithm” by changing the way you use Facebook and increase the number of friends you interact with regularly – more on this below.

If you use the Facebook mobile app, keep your eye out for the option to “Show more” or “Show less”.

This is another great way to help redefine which posts Facebook shows you.

The video above goes over all of the potential solutions to increase the diversity of posts in your Facebook News Feed. I also discuss how you can change your Feed view to view the most recent posts instead of “Top Stories” – Facebook’s name for the posts it’s Feed decides to serve up.

A detailed explanation on how to change the Facebook Feed view is below but I also recommend you watch the video as I go into detail about how the Facebook News Feed algorithm works as well as additional tips to freshen up your Feed.

View the “Most Recent” posts instead of “Top Stories”

One of the best ways to avoid dealing with the Facebook Feed algorithm altogether is to set your feed to the “Most Recent” view instead of the default Top Stories option.

This will display all posts from your Facebook friends and followed pages in chronological order.

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.
2. At the very top-left, click on the Most Recent section.
3. Posts from all of your Facebook friends will now be displayed in chronological order!

Change your how often you see posts from friends

You can also alter how often you see posts from each particular Facebook friend. Unfortunately, doing this is a bit more vague than it used to be.

In previous versions of Facebook, there was an option to show “All Updates”, “Most Updates” or “Only Important”. This option was available when clicking on the 3 dots on someone’s post.

Unless Facebook brings back this feature, the only way to do this now is to choose “Hide post”, “Snooze” or “Unfollow”.

All of these choices will have an effect on which posts are shown in your Feed in the future. Generally, all of these options will mean less posts from that particular friend.

To display fewer posts from a particular friend:

1. Navigate to your Facebook homepage.
2. Find a status update from the person who you would like to change your preferences for.
3. Click on the 3 dots in the top right corner of the post.
4. Choose Hide post, Snooze or Unfollow to see fewer posts from that friend.
5. Facebook will now show posts from other friends more often. It’s best to use this method on friends that are showing up in your Feed too often.

See More Friends Posts By Interacting Differently

As mentioned, the posts you see in your Facebook Feed are based on your past Facebook interactions. However, the algorithm is always updating based on how you use Facebook.

To see posts from a more diverse set of friends, try intentionally changing the way you use Facebook. Instead of just looking at updates from your Feed, try to look at updates from the most recent list and interact with posts from people that you’d like to see more of on Facebook.

Go directly to their Facebook profiles and start interacting with their posts. Like some of their posts, comment on them if you can, maybe even @mention them in a post of your own.

Start seeking out friends on Facebook instead of only letting the Feed bring them to you.

Try this out for about a month or so and then reevaluate how your Feed looks. You may be able to continue on as normal for a while before having to manually adjust the algorithm again.

Over time, the Facebook algorithm has a tendency to shrink friend groups instead of grow them. Be mindful of this and, if you want to see posts from more friends on Facebook, consider some of these tips and strategies.