The notorious time-suck

Facebook is the social media tool that many professionals love to hate: while it can be an efficient way to network, connect with clients, and promote a business, it can also be a notorious time suck, and platform for opinions and rants that you probably don’t want to care about.

Everybody has shared the experience of hopping on to Facebook, only to spend twenty unnecessary minutes scrolling through the News Feed because of aunts, next-door neighbors, or friends from high school that have a lot of political articles to post, or family snapshots to share. If you’re using Facebook for professional purposes, it takes a while to finally reach top leads and clients.

Love on top

Facebook is rolling out a new feature though, that may help solve that problem. Starting Monday, most users will begin seeing a reminder note to the right of their News Feeds, reading:

“Put the people you love at the top: we care about showing you posts from people who matter to you. We’ve made new controls that allow you to prioritize friends and family in your News Feed.”

Your cousin’s political rant on the bottom

Once users select certain friends and pages, new content since their last visits to Facebook will appear at the top of News Feed, along with a star in the top-right-hand corner, alerting users why those particular posts are at the top. The remainder of posts in News Feed will appear as they usually do (underneath the starred posts).

Time-suck fixed? We are only human

Does this mean that you’ll stop wasting time on the social network, or that you won’t get suckered into clicking on that meaningless article that your aunt (or your client!) posted? Of course not. But perhaps it will be helpful for productivity reasons to step into the internet vortex after you’ve spent time keeping track of leads and other work-related Facebook connections.

Let’s be real, this new star feature is great, but it won’t resolve all of your Facebook issues: you may be a professional but you’re only human, after all, against the temptation that is News Feed Nonsense. We all fall short.

#FacebookToTheTop