Valentine’s Day is finally here, and there are flowers, chocolates and hearts everywhere. It’s the most romantic day of the year…or is it?
If you’re single, you can feel under extra pressure to find someone at this time of year, and if you’re in a relationship, you feel the pressure to buy expensive and pointless gifts and put on a show of romance – not a great recipe for love. It’s no wonder many of us prefer to simply forget about the whole thing. But this can be a problem when everyone on your Facebook feed is posting lovey-dovey updates and photos. Fortunately, there are ways to adjust your social media so you can avoid the Valentine’s madness.
- By installing a browser extension such as www.socialfixer.com, you can block certain keywords from appearing on your newsfeed. Once installed, go to the filtering options and enter the words you don’t want to see (like “love”, “valentine’s”, “february 14”) and you’ll be safely protected from all the mushy status updates.
- If you have a Facebook friend who you know is going to flood your feed with stories about the amazing gifts their significant other bought them and how in love they are, you can unfollow them without going to the lengths of unfriending them. Simply go to their Facebook profile and look for the button marked “following”. Click on it so that it now says “follow”, and their posts will no longer appear in your feed. You can start following them again in a few days when their Valentine’s fever has passed – they’ll be none the wiser.
- If you use Tweetdeck, you can hide Valentine’s Day from your Twitter feed with ease. Simply click on your settings and you will be greeted with a menu which says General, Services and Mute. Click Mute, and set the drop-down menu to “Text Content”. As with Social Fixer, you can then enter the keywords you don’t want to see, and tweets containing those keywords will be banished from your feed.