Creating Facebook Interest Lists

Facebook encourages you to like everything from photos to comments to company pages. They even want you to like advertisements. Once you like all this stuff, it starts getting lost. If you don’t routinely interact with something you like, you gradually stop seeing the stuff you like.

Based on the way Facebook works, the site assumes that if you don’t interact with something, you might not actually care about it. While this is certainly true for me in situations where I liked something in exchange for a discount or some other freebie, sometimes I stop interacting with things because there’s too much noise drowning them out. I’m guessing you aren’t much different.

Organize Your Interests

Instead of allowing your interests to get lost in updates from your friends, sponsored posts, games, and all the other stuff vying for your attention, there’s a better option. Facebook allows you to create Interest Lists. These lists are curated by you or another Facebook user, allowing you to group Facebook users and pages into common interest groups.

My brother got me interested in stand up paddle boarding (SUP), so I’ve been following a bunch of things related to SUP on Facebook. While I can Like individual brands and count on the Facebook Edge Rank algorithm to show me interesting posts about SUP, I find it easier to organize the brands and people into an interest list. If other people are also interested in SUP, they can subscribe to the list, so I help others in addition to helping myself.

You can create your own interest list about absolutely anything or track your interests using someone else’s list.

Creating Facebook Interest Lists

If you’ve never created an interest list before, Facebook won’t show you the Interests section of your sidebar. You will need to click the More link at the bottom of the left hand side of your news feed. From there, you click Add Interests to get started.

Once you finally uncover the interests page, Facebook encourages you to search for interest lists.

People like my friend Robert Scoble have already created some great interest lists, which are suggested by Facebook and anyone can subscribe to. Or if you aren’t interested in the same thing he is, create your own.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can add virtually any person or brand to an interest list. Facebook makes it easy to track down the things you already like, but you can also add people, products, and brands from categories that may interest you.

Once you create a list, it shows up in the left column next to your Facebook news feed. Anytime you want to see what’s going on in that particular interest list, just click on it to see the latest updates. Facebook will also make sure some of those items still appear in your general feed, so you may start seeing some of the things that interest you more often as a result, even if you don’t visit the list regularly.

In relation to my own efforts to avoid social bankruptcy, interest lists are invaluable. How do you think you will use this Facebook list feature?