How To Start Seeing Facebook Reels That Are More Interesting To You
In a perfect world, every time you log into a social media app or platform, all you'll see on your news feed are posts that you actually find riveting, featuring subjects that are tailored toward your likes and interests. Unfortunately, the advancement of recommendation algorithms in the social media space is somewhat hit or miss, and more often than not, you may see entries on apps like Facebook that don't necessarily fit your definition of entertaining. However, that's about to change for some users, thanks to a recent platform update.
Meta recently announced better controls for suggested Facebook Reels that appear on your feed. In addition, the company also made it easier to discover short-form Facebook videos in different areas of the app. Now, not only do Reels appear sporadically when you scroll down your feed, but a tab leading to the feature can also be found on top of the Facebook Watch page, through both web and mobile platforms.
Where to view Reels on Facebook
In general, regular Facebook users should occasionally come across Reels — which can be 90 seconds long, at the most — in their Facebook feeds when other people in their network share them. They will bear the "Reels" label underneath the account name, helping you distinguish them from other video posts on your feed. Another way to single these posts out is the absence of full playback controls — you can click or tap on one to pause it, but you cannot fast forward or rewind.
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Short videos recommended by Facebook are also often interspersed between news feed posts shared by people they've added as contacts, pages they've liked and followed, and groups they've joined. The reels you may see this way — which may appear as a carousel of 5-6 video posts — may have been suggested to you based on your activity on the app and what the algorithm deems relevant to your interests.
People who peruse Facebook via a computer can find an endless scroll of Facebook reels by selecting Watch from the left sidebar of the site's main page and then choosing Reels. You will see one Reel video occupy the page, which will keep playing unless you pause it. It then will either automatically replay in a loop, or you can hit the next arrow to manually view a new Reel.
You can get there in a similar manner using Facebook's mobile app. Once you launch it on your device, just hit the Watch button located at the bottom edge of the screen and then navigate to the Reels tab. Simply swipe up or down to view a new short video or go back to the previous one.
How to tweak Facebook's suggested Reels
Facebook users can essentially teach the social media platform's recommendation algorithm to be more in tune with what they want to see on the app, Reels-wise. If you feel like the seemingly random short videos that you see as suggested posts don't quite hit the mark for you, here's what you can do to improve future Reels recommendations:
- Go to Facebook and open a Reels video.
- Tap the three-dot icon in the bottom-right corner of the video player.
- To stop seeing Reels videos that have similar content, hit "Show less."
- If the short video's subject matter is something that greatly interests you, hit "Show more."
Jam Kotenko/SlashGear
The newly rolled-out controls may not yet appear for some Facebook users or on certain Facebook reels. If that is the case, you can influence future Facebook posts and recommendations by tapping "Hide reel" on any post you'd like to see less of. On a computer, you can click "See less" or "Hide post."
Jam Kotenko/SlashGear
Much like other social media app features, routinely doing this every time you come across a Facebook Reels post should improve the type of content the platform presents to you as suggested entries in the future. The steps should be similar whether you like using Facebook on a computer web browser or through the mobile app. They can also be executed on any Reels post, both on the main feed or through Facebook Watch.