Facebook announced several major new additions to News Feed today aimed at giving you more control over the types of content you want to see.

“The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you,”  Product Manager Jacob Frantz wrote in a blog post. “To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.”

One of the new features introduced today allows users to choose which friends and Pages they want prioritized, placing those updates towards the top of News Feed. This will make it easier to keep up with close friends or important pages without being bogged down by the dozens or hundreds of acquaintances that can sometimes clutter your feed.

To access this feature, navigate to your News Feed Preferences menu and choose “Prioritize who you want to see first.” You can then tap on the profile picture of a friend or Page you are following to see all of their updates at the top of your feed as they are posted.

The updates also include a new menu to unfollow individual friends from the mobile app, which had previously required users to navigate through a few different pages to access. The feature works the same as the new “Prioritize” option. Just choose “Unfollow people to hide their posts” from the News Feed Preferences menu and tap the profiles you want to unfollow.

Facebook is also making it easier to find interesting Pages to follow by giving recommendations based on the Pages you have already liked.

“Helping you find new Pages to follow can help you connect with publishers, artists and businesses you might be interested in,” Frantz wrote. “Based on the types of Pages you’ve liked in the past, you can discover new Pages in order to get more of the stories you care about.”

The new controls for News Feed are currently available for the iOS version of the Facebook app only, but the updates will be rolling out to Android devices and desktop “over the coming weeks.”

Image credit: Facebook (c)