5 Useful Facebook Features and Tricks You May not be Using

Most internet users are on Facebook and it’s a known fact that the social networking giant currently has, as of the third quarter of 2015, 1.55 billion monthly active users. That’s a whole lot, and chances are that you’re reading this because you’re one of those 1.55 billion people. Most of us use Facebook on our smartphones like everyone else, but still, a lot of us don’t know there are smarter ways to use the platform.

It’s not just about connecting with friends, reading the news feed and checking messages, Facebook offers much more than that. As more users keep coming to the platform and businesses are using the platform daily to promote their brands, Facebook keep adding new features.

In this post, we will be showing you five Facebook features and tricks you’ve probably not been using all these while.

1. Facebook Graph Search

Most people use Facebook search only for searching for names and pages to like. That search bar on Facebook does more than that. It’s a semantic search engine that’s meant to understand your natural language and respond to your queries with useful informations.

For instance, lets assume you need to know your friends in live in the same city as you, typing “My friends who live in Lagos” should show you a list of your friends living in Lagos.

It doesn’t end there, just think of a reasonable search query and give it a shot. You can type “posts about dogs” to see public posts about dogs. Clicking the latest tab at the top should shows you the latest posts with the page auto updating about new posts about dogs.

As said earlier, it’s a semantic search engine meant to understand natural search queries. Try search for “posts about me,” “my friends who like food” and so on…

Although this search engine is meant to understand your general search query and show you useful results, you still got to be reasonable with the queries you input or the result won’t be what you want.

I noticed this isn’t working so well on Facebook mobile app though I’m not using the latest version of the app. Graph search seems to work better on Facebook web version.

2. Re-arranging the news feed (Twitter style)

Surprisingly, this easily accessible feature is being ignored by a lot of Facebook users. Instead of allowing Facebook to sort your news feed based on stories that might be of interest to you, you can choose to re-arrange your Facebook news feed Twitter style, with the most recent posts first, followed by older stories. On Facebook web, you should be able to change this option from the left sidebar as shown below:

This option is also available on the mobile app.

Just go to the menu tab, scroll down a bit and select “Most Recent”.

3. Prioritize who to see first on your feed

Okay, if you have one of those friends who’s always asking you if you saw their Facebook post and you’re always saying “No” all the time, perhaps you’re going to find this feature very useful. In case you would like to see updates from people close to you too, you can choose to prioritize their updates and they’ll always appear at the top of your news feed. You can access this option by going to your account menu as shown below and select News Feed Preferences.

From here, you can search for, and select who you want to see first on your news feed.

This option too is available on mobile and you can access it by clicking the menu icon and selecting News Feed Preferences.

There are other options available too on this page like hiding stories from certain people from your news feed and reconnecting with those you’ve previously unfollowed.

4. Hiding your updates from certain people

There are times you would like to post an update but still wish to hide it from just one particular person. Facebook allows you to do this and this feature is available both on the web and mobile app. On the web version, just before posting a status update or photo, click the audience selector icon below the text area:

Select More Options. On the new page that pops up, type the person’s name in the second box, and select from the list as shown below:

Similarly on the mobile app, just before posting your update or picture, tap the audience selector, then tap More to access more options.

Select Friends except. On the next page, type the person’s name and select it from the list that shows up:

Hit the back button to publish your post and the selected friend(s) will never see that post.
5. Privately sync your photos

Unknown to a lot of people, Facebook lets you privately store all your pictures. This means even if you lose your phone, you will never lose your photos. You can easily download everything back to your new phone from Facebook.

You should know that Facebook will never publish you synced photos, everything is kept private. To activate this feature from you Facebook mobile app, go to the menu tab and select App Settings. On the next page, select Photo Syncing.

From here, you can enable photo synchronization and keep all your photos privately on Facebook.

There are even more features you may not be using apart from these: Interests lists, Facebook Moments, saving news feed links to read later, getting notifications through RSS and more. Is there a hidden Facebook feature we missed that should be on this list? Let us know through the comments.