Facebook Testing Mobile Feature Allowing Users To Pick News Feed Priority

Almost everyone uses Facebook these days, and everyone that does knows there are posts from certain friends that they want to see more than others. Well, the social network may finally be acknowledging it, as they have apparently begun rolling out a test feature to users of the Facebook mobile app allowing them to choose which friends and pages will appear at the top of their News Feed. Not everyone is seeing this new feature at this point, but those that do are able to give posts from the people they prefer a prioritized place atop their feed.

Those that are getting the opt-in test feature will see a box with a cartoon dog prompting them to "See more of what you love." Selecting "Get started" has users choose which friends and pages they've connected with that they want to top the News Feed. Posts from these accounts will then no longer be sorted by Facebook's algorithm.

Prior to this test feature, there wasn't really an easy way for users to make sure they could see every post from preferred friends and pages, unless they chose to turn on notifications. They only option users have now for sorting their News Feed is either by latest updates or "Top Stories." Latest updates simply shows the most recent posts from everyone a user has connected with, while Top Stories is meant to show the most important/popular posts in a user's network, as determined by Facebook's algorithm.

This new feature seems like a great way to give users more personal control over how their News Feed works, but Facebook has declined to give any further information other than it is part of a limited test. This means we have no idea if the feature will become a permanent part of the mobile app/website, or if they'll decide to cut it.

SOURCE AdWeek