On This Day feature of Facebook may surprise you with different postings on the same day across different years where you may have forgetten if some of these postings were really ever been posted. The question is, how can we find other old postings without waiting for another year, another month, another day until it appears on ‘onthisday‘ page?
Facebook has provided a way to find those postings, but it is not always obvious to most of the users. It took me awhile to figure out the existence of this tool.
Here are the steps to show you how to search, especially to find postings where you have some ideas of the possible month and days of the year when you posted. In that way, we can narrow down the search to a month range in a particular year. However, this only applies when you are using a desktop computer, not a mobile device. The screen of a mobile device is too small to display all the pictures used in this method.
Here are the steps you need to do:
- You must be in the Wall of your Facebook page or the wall of your FB friend, where the Timeline tab is selected to start this search.
- Scroll up the page, until the profile picture will disappear on top of the screen.
- Once the profile picture disappears, you will see a box with three choices, (Facebook Account owner’s) Name, Timeline, and Recent tabs pop-up. The last two boxes have a small inverted triangle at the end of their names pointing downward, which indicates each of them has more choices that will appear in a drop down menu once it’s clicked.
- You may click on Timeline to see the options, then click on each of the menu items and try to understand where each of the selection will take you. Once you know what they will provide, you can go back to repeat the step-3 above then skip to next step.
- Move to and click on the next box, Recent, and it will give you a pop-up menu, showing a list of years starting from current year back down to the year you joined the FB in descending order. If during the sign-up time you had also provided Facebook with various dates of your life events, then you will see a list of descending order of years, skipping those years with no event or activity posted all the way down to the year you were born.
- When you click on any year after you join the Facebook, another tab will show up on the right of the three existing tabs above. The new tab will show the year of your selection. On you Facebook Timeline you will see the header, saying “Posts from the selected year,” then it will display the posts starting from the last post on December 31 of that year in your Timeline. If it’s the year before you join the Facebook, then it will display the post on a particular date that you have posted on Facebook.
- Furthermore, when you click on that tab, the pop up menu on the particular year will show you a choice to select either the All Posts, or the Activity Log. The first one shows a blue background and a check mark as shown in the Figure. Below these two selections in that pop-up menu is the list of the months from January – December. If you click on any of this month, you will see the posts from that particular month of that year appear on your timeline. You may also try to click the activity log to see it bring you back to Activity Log on the particular month of the year of your selection.
The final step gives you the option to search for the particular post only in that month. You maybe lucky to find it in one trial, or you may repeat your search a few times until you can finally locate your old post. Either way, you may finally locate an old post fast enough comparing to frustratingly scrolling down from your wall until you could find it.
Hope these steps may help you to shortening your time in finding an old post from your wall or a Facebook friend’s wall.
If you have any question or find anything that is not working, please fill out in the comment box below. If you find the information is helpful and may help your FB friends too, you don’t need to ask my permission and please go ahead to share it to your wall.(drt)***
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