Snooze Keywords: How to Gain More Control of your Facebook News Feed

The option to snooze keywords on Facebook represents a substantial leap in control over the news feed. Yea!

Since about the summer of 2017, when posts show up in your News Feed that you'd rather not see in the future, there is a way to adjust your experience (in many cases). Here's how:

How to Snooze keywords on your Facebook News Feed:

1. Find the upper-right corner of a post and click to pull down the menu and find the option to "snooze keywords". (It's possible that "more options" will need to be clicked in succession.)
2. Click on "Snooze keywords". When more than one option is available, another pop-up will appear
3. Choose the keyword/phrase you no longer wish to appear in your news feed
4. Click "Snooze"

Note that keyword snoozes are only "temporarily" offered at this time. After all, snoozing is something that people generally want to forget that they've done, and they may actually prefer to be reminded later no matter how they feel now. It's like an alarm clock: hit snooze and get back to sleep . . . but we still have to wake up at some point. 

Any figurative synapse firings going on in your mind right now are right on target. We could argue that the most advanced among us never need alarms, much less snoozes. (We're talking about snoozing current-event topics under some circumstances.)

While fans of a popular music culture magazine, for example, wouldn't generally want their content to be limited, it's been known to occur that certain types of posts will inflame a certain portion of readers—which makes it interesting to point out, for readers and publications alike, this ability to snooze keywords. Ideally, this allows miffed readers to maintain their usual pursuits in those parts of life that they like.

I've used the idea of "popular music culture" magazine as an example here due to the fact that a mag may sometimes be regarded as a niche music-only publication, thus beloved by fans of music; however, when they publish political stories [in social media] it sometimes happens that a number of fans will be turned off. You know the drill: offended parties create stink and threaten to Unlike (boycott) something that they have otherwise always appreciated . . . over a personal opinion or general report.

So now, instead of having no option but complaint, a reader can make a personal adjustment to the content they receive from the magazine. This seems a fair standard option [for a social media platform]. 

Readers now have the option, thanks to social media engineering, offers network users to continue following their favorite music mag while also directing the platform (Facebook) to stream less of the type of content they don't want to see - content that could be of a political nature, or specific a column perhaps.

A person may  not be interested in "chart toppers", for example, or any of a number of other keywords pulled from a publisher's text content area. They now have an option to choose, while continuing to enjoy their usual reads. 

Refer below to an image of the options presented when a reader clicks on "Snooze keywords" for a general weather report. It's easy to imagine an influx of bad-weather-day posts that seem to clog a person's news feed. In this case, they might choose to snooze "weather alert", "weather radar", and "snow flurries": this would likely change the look of their feed on such a day to something more in line with their needs.   

Great: What about snoozing Facebook ads?

The snooze option likely won't be available for ads, which have a different protocol for handling: either "hide ad" or "report ad", using the same top-right corner pull-down menu.

Also note that when a post doesn't include content in its text field that the snooze keyword option cannot be triggered as a tool for reader control, and it's also possible that a text content area might not contain a relevant keyword identifiable to the system, hence no option to snooze. Plus, any of your group posts that show up in your feed likely won't have the option, for now. 


REF:
Keyword Snooze: A New Way to Help Control Your News Feed,  https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/keyword-snooze-a-new-way-to-help-control-your-news-feed/ (last visited December 12, 2018).