Facebook Newsfeed and the Misdirected Outrage of UnFans

Today I received a message from a “former” fan of one of the Pages I manage on Facebook. This particular page has over 85k Likes, so the volume of Messages and Notifications is pretty high. This particular message stood out, though:

“please stop sending messages.. i have unlike you and dont know why i keep getting posts”

This is one of those frustrating things about how Facebook works that most users do not understand. But she was nice enough in her message, and even if she had been hateful, I want to try and answer people in the kindest, most helpful way possible on behalf of my clients, so here is how I responded. Feel free to use this as a guide for the next time you receive a bit of "misdirected outrage" from a Facebook “un-fan” about seeing your posts in their newsfeed. Alternatively, if you are one of those who is frustrated because you keep seeing posts in your Newsfeed from Pages that you have "un-Liked" (or never Liked in the first place), these instructions will help you as well.

Our apologies, Beth, but we do not control what appears in your Newsfeed. Facebook makes those decisions for each person individually.

If you have "unliked" the [brandX] page but are still seeing posts from us, it is likely that Facebook keeps showing you our posts because your Facebook friends have Liked, Commented, or Shared our posts. Here are the instructions on how to stop that from happening in the future. The next time you see a post from [brandX] in your Newsfeed, take the following steps:

1. In the upper right corner of any [brandX] post which appears in your Newsfeed there will be a small, grey drop down arrow (looks like a lower case "v"). Click on it.
2. In the drop-down list that appears, there should be an option to "Hide all from [brandX]. Stop seeing posts from this page." Click that button.

If that doesn't work, you'll need to use Facebook's "Help" feature for any additional troubleshooting on this issue.

So there you go. Problem solved ... maybe. Only Facebook really knows. Also, maybe I didn't give the best advice to this user. Did I leave something out? Are there reasons that she could still be seeing our posts that I failed to mention? Let me know in the comments. (And as always, please be nice.)

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About Eric Wilbanks

Brand strategist. Wordsmith. Change architect. Training specialist. DiSC Certified. Family guy (hot wife and 4 cool kids). Love my Bible, guitars, baseball, and MMA.