Create A Tabbed Facebook Feed Using Post Filters

Social Fixer gives you the ability to separate your Facebook news feed into tabs. By default, it even puts posts by applications in their own tab. But to really get the most out of tabs, you need to write custom Feed Filter Rules and move posts to exactly where you want them. This post will give you an example of how someone might do just that.

Let’s say a person wants to make sense of their Facebook feed by organizing their posts like this:

• Move every post from a family member into a tab called “Family”. Everything they post, even from apps.
  • Move posts from the games I actually play to their own tabs by Application Name
    • Hide all other application posts </ul> </ul> Easy! But first, let’s take a quick look at the options in the “Filtering” tab:

    

    **Enable Filters
    ** Lets you turn the entire Filter functionality on or off. This is great for testing

    **Always show all defined tabs (even if no posts are moved there)
    ** lets you maintain a consistent tab interface. If you define 5 tabs in your filters, then this option will cause them to always be shown, in the order defined. Otherwise, tabs are created on-the-fly as needed. When posts match a filter and are moved to a tab, if the tab doesn’t exist already it is created as the last tab.

    Filter posts on pages and profiles
    When you visit someone’s profile or page, you may not want posts moved to tabs or hidden by rules like you do on your main news feed. If unchecked, posts on pages and profiles will stay where they are.

    Custom App list
    You can either populate this manually with applications that Social Fixer doesn’t already know about, or it will also get populated automatically when you click the “+” icon in an application post to move it to a tab.

    The real magic starts happening below, in the feed filter section. This is where we will define our filters that move posts to tabs.

    Filter #1: Move Family to Tab

    

    Here I have selected my family members from the list of friends. I selected multiple rows by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each one. I left “Type” and “Application” unselected, because I want to filter all posts. In “Action” I select “Move to Tab” and type in “Family” for the tab name.

    The next check box is important – “Stop processing rules”. This means that when a post matches this filter, I want to move it to the tab and then STOP! I don’t want the post to then be evaluated in the next rule, which might move it somewhere else. Each post is processed by each filter, one after the other, even if a filter matches the post. This lets you apply multiple rules in a cascading fashion. But our next rule is going to move game posts to their own tab, and I don’t want my family’s game posts to move there, so I need to check “Stop processing rules”.

    Filter #2: Move Game Posts To Tabs

    

    Here I have selected some of the games I play, and again selected “Move to Tab”. But for tab name I use the special tag: . This makes a tab that has the name of the application itself. So rather than making a separate filter for each application and putting in each name, I can create a single filter and they will each be moved to a tab with their own name.

    Again I choose to “Stop processing rules” so that these application posts don’t then get hidden by the next rule.

    Note: When selecting applications, the “Type” select list gets hidden, because it doesn’t make sense to select a type and an application.

    Filter #3: Hide Posts by Applications

    

    Our final filter is simple. We want to hide all other posts by any application. So we select that type from the list (which hides the application list because it wouldn’t make sense to then choose a specific application), then we click the “Hide” action. All posts by applications will now be hidden from the feed. Except, of course, the applications used by my Family, or the games that I play because those have already been filtered and not hidden.

    The Result

    

    Now when I view my news feed, my posts are nicely separated into tabs that I can read more easily. I can catch up with my Family, then read everyone else’s posts, then take a look at my Games. Everything is combined together into one huge feed anymore. Ah, much better!

    I hope this gives you some ideas about how to use tabs and filters to take better control over your Facebook feed!