Facebook lets people ‘snooze’ posts from Pages, others for 30 days

Facebook is giving people a way to put Pages on timeout.

On Friday, Facebook rolled out a snooze button for people to temporarily stop seeing posts from certain accounts, including Pages and groups, for 30 days. “By selecting Snooze in the top-right drop-down menu of a post, you won’t see content from those people, Pages or groups in your News Feed for that time period,” Facebook Product Manager Shruthi Muraleedharan wrote in a company blog post published on Friday.

Facebook will not notify accounts when they’ve been snoozed, but it will let people doing the snoozing know when it’s time for an account to be unsnoozed, in case they want to extend the pause. People can also unsnooze an account before the 30 days are up.

Given how scarce organic reach already is for Pages, the snooze button could lead brands and publishers to pull back on the number of posts they publish for fear of annoying people to the point of pressing snooze, which would not only curtail their organic reach but could also factor into how Facebook’s algorithm chooses to distribute their ads.

While the snooze setting is temporary, it could have a permanent impact if Facebook’s News Feed algorithm uses snoozes as a signal when deciding how high or low to rank posts in people’s News Feed, even if those people weren’t the ones who snoozed an account. It could also hurt Pages if snoozers decide that they didn’t miss a Page’s posts and opt to unfollow altogether.