Pirela Creative Solutions

• Tweet

• Tweet

Facebook Subscribe Button

What you need to know about Facebook Subscribe button, an attempt to copy Google+ and Twitter, will provide control over what your friends share with you. Allow users to Subscribe to people’s profiles and see their updates without being their Facebook friend. The updates of people you subscribe will become visible in your news feed along with your friends’ updates. You can also subscribe to your current friends and you will be given the option of what type updates and how many updates you receive about them in your news feed. However, you will only be able to see the updates that the poster marks as “public.”

In the past, if one of your friends played games (that I’m not fond of any of them) and love posting constant updates of their gaming activity, you can now block out this updates and only request updates that you consider “important.” Before you would have no choice to either block specific game from your News Feed or physically remove that persons updates altogether. Subscribe allows you to condense friends’ random posts without missing out important news.

Intriguing move for Facebook because they were actually saying to people to forget about pages and instead focus on getting people to subscribe to their personal profiles. The concept of Subscribe who are not your Facebook friends seems a little bit unusual, but for thought leaders, celebrities, and public figures the new feature may become a powerful tool. Now, public figures can also broadcast directly from their profile to interested followers, much like a Twitter account. This will be substantially important for journalists, musicians, and other small public figures that don’t have a Facebook presence at the present time. It seems strange to see Facebook move people away from Pages, where they make advertising money, but probably it’s all intended to make the site more social and maybe is a special spot reserved for pages with more significant sharing of content.

For those who are concerned about the privacy of posts, note that if you have your settings on “friends only,” subscribers who are not your Facebook friends will still not be able to see your updates. And if this still isn’t satisfactory, you can always dismiss the subscribe option altogether so you will not begin accumulating subscribers.

Although, Facebook Subscribe button has substantial benefits for individual users and public figures, the button doesn’t bring anything to the table for businesses. You can’t subscribe to a company page, but Facebook will be rolling out a tool to migrate all Fan Page’s fans over to subscribers on a personal account, the downside is you will lose all of your Fan Page content. Additionally, they don’t have analytics associated with them and can’t be updated by multiple administrators, which poses a problem for companies.

In conclusion, Facebook Subscribe button automatically subscribe you to your friends’ updates, giving you a simple way to control which updates you receive, will help thinning out your news feed, and help popular public figures to build their Facebook presence; the impact of the tool is somewhat limited. The Facebook Subscribe button appears to be an imitation of Twitter “follower” model.

Have you started to use Facebook Subscribe button? Do you have any comments or experiences to add to my post?

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

Post filed under Advertising, Blog, Brand, Facebook, Marketing, Privacy, Social Networks and tagged Facebook, Facebook Page, Facebook Subscribe Button.