When you like to keep up with what dozens or even hundreds of nonprofits are saying and doing on Facebook, you need a list of pages. Unfortunately, Facebook nixed the Interest List feature back in 2016. Yes, I’m still salty about it, because I had actually paid someone to set up a whole bunch of curated interest lists for me. You could also share them with others, which was wonderful. Then they disappeared.
At the time, you could not add Pages to a personal Friends List. So lots of workarounds were created. Many people created a Page themselves and then followed other Pages with that dummy page. But what a hassle. I never bothered.
Then I recently decided that I really did want that customized newsfeed of specific Pages again. I want my old list of big nonprofits with well-funded communications teams to keep up with the trends in how they use Facebook. I want my old list of nonprofits that have participated in our Mentoring Program. I want the list of Pages run by nonprofits that I personally donate to. And I don’t want them mixed in with all my personal friend stuff — I want a separate feed!
So I started poking around with the newer Saved and Collection features, but nothing did the trick. I want a feed of recent posts, not just a list of pages that I have to click through to one at a time. That’s no better than a list of Favorites in Chrome.
Then I realized that now I CAN add Pages to Custom Friend Lists. Woo-Hoo! I was so excited, even though it meant that I had to actually go like each page and then go to the custom list, search for the page, hope it came up in the dropdown list (not all of them do, even when you like them) and then add them to the custom list. Lots of steps, but doable.
But as I started to create the new list of the big nonprofits, page by page, something didn’t feel right. I felt like I was about to get jerked around again by Facebook. I could just feel it.
So I did more searching and found this post on Social Media Examiner from just a few days ago.
It says that the Friends List Feed on the iOS app is disappearing this week! You can still create the lists to share to them, but you won’t be able to see the feed of posts by people or pages on that list.
ARGH!
Now, I am an Android user and when I am usually looking at these lists, I am using the desktop browser version. BUT STILL.
If they are removing the custom friends list feed from one app, it can’t be long until they disable it from others, right?
So, do I spend a couple hours recreating these lists while I can, or would that make me an idiot?
Will Facebook ever create something that allows a customized Pages Feed without destroying it a year or two later?
Feel free to share your response in the comments. 🙂
