Facebook has employed a new and really annoying strategy to force its users to see more advertising. Pages that your Facebook friends LIKE, which have updates, are now showing up dead and center in your newsfeed when these pages have updates, and not just as an ad on the side of things! So stuff you don’t care about will be flooding your newsfeed via your friends even when your friends are not actually doing anything… and you’ll have to look through them to get past to the next stories! It is really annoying!!!

So how do you resolve this other than removing one story at a time in your newsfeed? What are the consequences of this? Why should you clean up your LIKE list? Read on to find out!

Remove Life Updates from your what you see in your Facebook friends’ Settings for what appears in your newsfeed.

• Click on your Facebook Friend’s name that appears with a Like.
• Find the Friend button near the upper right hand corner.
• Hover over the Friend button till you get a drop down menu.
• Click on Settings in the drop down menu.
• In the menu that opens from this, click on Life Updates to remove it and you’re done.

If your Facebook Friend likes a new page, meaning an action was taken, it will show up in your newsfeed. However, that is from an action they took rather than an intrusive ad coming from nothing.

Changing how often updates will appear on your newsfeed, like Only Important in the Friend drop down menu doesn’t seem to affect how often these ads appear. They still appear.

What consequences will come of your actions?

Facebook isn’t stupid. They put these ads in your newsfeed with Life Updates for a reason. It’s the thing most people would care about in terms of newsfeed items. Life Updates include when your Facebook Friends change relation statuses, jobs, got a new home, etc. Those tend to be relatively “big” events compared to Status Updates of what you’re doing today or a link you want to share with friends.

Removing Life Updates means you won’t be immediately notified of these big changes. However, the consolation is that it’s not likely to be long before you hear about it from comments your friends will make or people will be buzzing about it. If it’s a real friend you care about at all, you probably have some common friends and they’ll be buzzing about any such big changes in a person’s life. You can see it in the ticker, or people will just ask you. Trust your real friends to talk about the big things happening in life! 🙂

That’s the decision you have to make, to put up with all kinds of ads or be just a bit late on some life news of some friends. Personally, it’s an easy choice for me.

Remove ads for a few friends at a time

Facebook is also not stupid in not allowing you to remove these ads on a mass removal basis. You will have to remove them for one person at a time as they appear in your newsfeed, unless you want to systematically be proactive to go through your Facebook Friends list one person at a time, for those you haven’t filtered out already.

If you’ve got a ridiculous number of Facebook Friends to do this to and the ads are overwhelming, maybe this is the motivation you need to clean up your Facebook Friends list. Here are some other good reasons for doing so if you need help to decide.

Minimize your LIKEs’ impact on your Facebook Friends’ Newsfeed and WHY

Items you LIKE will also appear in your friends’ newsfeed as free ads, just as much as their LIKEs will appear in your newsfeed. So what can you do to minimize your impact on your Facebook Friends’ newsfeed?

Remove your “corporate” LIKEs and those which don’t belong to your Facebook Friends.

By “corporate”, I mean companies that aren’t small businesses who might have a lot of money to advertise. These advertisements aren’t appearing for free, you know, but Facebook is getting the benefits for it, not you! Stick it to the corporations that are doing this to you!

Other LIKEs which don’t belong to your Facebook Friends could also be removed, especially if any of them may be active to send out messages like celebrities. Unless you really care to follow these updates, rather than just show others you’re a fan of these people, I’d say remove them. Those friends who really care to know, they’ll eventually ask you. But this is up to you.

Other LIKEs you have may still appear from time to time in your friends’ newsfeeds as they advertise, but if you do this before they remove your Life Updates in their newsfeed, you can prevent getting partially blocked out yourself.

I’m going to do mine right now! 🙂