A screen capture of why only some people show up on your Facebook wall
Today, my good friend Connie Crosby brought to my attention the reason only selected peoples updates are showing up on the my Facebook wall. It seems that Facebook is randomly updating your wall with only 250 of your friends that they have somehow determined to be the ones you want to hear from. I decided to do a screen capture with screen jelly to show you how I upped the wall permissions from 250 friends to 5,000. I am not 100% sure that this will solve the problem but I will keep my eye on it and offer any further knowledge I have by updating this post. If you have any further facts please share in the comments.
BEST VIEWED FULL-SCREEN
Relevant Links:
Facebook Changing the Width of Custom Application Tabs
Keith Burtis is a social media and digital marketing professional. If you or your company are looking to REV THE ENGINE on your digital efforts contact Keith today! Specialties include: Blog design/Integration, Custom Facebook Pages, Social, Digital and Interactive Content strategies.
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Jen, thanks much for this tip. maybe tomorrow I’ll do a screen cast showing how to utilize the hide feature for apps. Thanks!
keithburtis´s last blog ..A screen capture of why only some people show up on your Facebook wall 
Thanks for posting this solution. I saw Connie’s post too, but when I went to look at the setting I got the same blank result as you.
I checked out Facebook’s picks for the friends I most want to hear from (and the opposite) and for the most part it was really accurate. Facebook used to allow one to designate people that one wanted to hear more – or less – from. They got rid of the feature (except for blocking people from one’s feed completely) and I missed it. There are some friends that post a ton of garbage that fills my feed (eg. about their stupid little FB zoos, or farms, or gardens). I block those applications when I can (doesn’t work on my FB Blackberry app) but I didn’t want to block the people from my feed. Hopefully, this new option will allow users to better tailor their feeds. (I also hope that adults on FB will soon stop signing up for those cloyingly-cute & totally pointless FB apps)
Hi Keith, great tip, and thanks for inadvertently exposing me to Screen Jelly. It looks perfect for me (I need to buy Snow Leopard so I can upgrade to Screenflow soon, but this will get me by in a pinch).
It sounds like the idea behind the news feed in Facebook is turning into the same thing as unique search results by Google.
I worry about this for two reasons. I enjoy seeing everyone’s streams, because friends I rarely talk with might say something interesting that I would never hear about normally. That’s kind of the point of Facebook. I didn’t friend these people so I’d never hear from them. I think Facebook should allow me to choose who I want to hear from most. I don’t think an algorithm can ever truly replicate what we want.
Second, seems like the mission of Facebook and Google is to continue to build walls separating potential customers from advertisers. Just because you haven’t clicked on a link from your florist’s fan page in six months, doesn’t mean you might not jump on a special coupon they’re offering.
Your thoughts?
Patick, You summed up my sentiments exactly, “I enjoy seeing everyone’s streams, because friends I rarely talk with might say something interesting that I would never hear about normally. ”
This is exactly my thought. It takes out that serendipitous contact.
I agree with everything your saying. I have been developing a lot of custom Facebook pages and they are making a lot of changes there. It seems that they want to cool off the viral nature of the network. What I mean by this is, in the example you give of the flower shop they want to try and force the flower shop to purchase advertising. By pushing back on the ones that are a bit less popular (and this is most!) they force them to purchase ad’s in order to get in front of their desired audience. Lets face facts.. 99% of all the companies building fan pages are entranced by the global numbers and shiny object… they really have no clue how to creatively engage a user.
I have at least 30-40 other points of proof that Facebook seems to be more profit oriented than customer friendly. Without seeming like I’m tooting my own horn they should really contact me for Facebook Fan Page development for these very reasons. I see what is working and what is not. By being in the back end quite a bit I am able to identify a lot of these issues and address them. I don’t know hat the average number of followers is for a Facebook fan page but I am betting it’s less than 50. This very topic spurred my thoughts for the blog post I wrote tonight.
Facebook at 400 million users….So what? Traditional metrics need not apply!
Yup
To see more, you need to make sure to choose “most recent” to get updates as they are entered. When you have scrolled down to the bottom of the page you can choose to see more entries. There is also an “edit” option to hide apps from appearing on your news feed. Now that I’m more accustomed to the new format the more I like it. Hope this was helpful 