Facebook Tip: How to Create a List for Subscriptions

When Facebook announced the new Subscriptions service last week, some users complained that the additional News Feed volume made keeping up with actual friends more difficult.

If you use Subscriptions, you can follow people’s public posts without having to be Facebook friends. When the person you’re subscribed to posts something publicly, it appears in your News Feed. The Subscription feature, Facebook says, makes it easy to follow people you find interesting that you typically wouldn’t interact with, such as celebrities and political figures.

Creating a list for your subscriptions is a useful way to separate their posts from your friends’ posts. Here’s how to do it.

How to Create a List for Subscriptions

1. To create a list for your Subscriptions, click the Lists link on the left side navigation, then select “Create a List.”

2. Next, name your list, then select “Add/Remove Friends” from the “Manage List” drop-down menu on the top right of your screen.

3. On the next screen, click the drop-down menu that says “Friends” and select “Subscriptions.”

4. Here, select the people you want to put on that list. If you’re subscribed to many people, this step might take some time since there’s no “select all” option. You have to manually click each picture to add them to the list.

5. Once you’ve selected who you want to put in that list, click Done. Back on your left-side navigation, you’ll see the new list. Click the list to view updates from only these people.

I suggest grouping your subscriptions into a few lists that make sense to you—one for celebrities and one for political figures, for example—especially if you subscribe to many people. Editing and merging lists after they’re created can get a little complicated and tedious.

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