Have people you want to know more about? Introducing the Facebook Subscribe button
Facebook has been busy rolling out several improvements recently that are designed to allow content to be viewed more broadly on Facebook and throughout the web, as well as to help you have more control over what you see in your news feed.
Designed to allow you hear directly from people that you are interested in but don’t know personally (like journalists, artists, or political figures), the Facebook Subscribe button makes it easy for you to choose what people you hear from in your news feed, and receive content from people outside of your circle of friends. You will also see suggestions appearing of people you may be interested in subscribing to, based on your behavior and established likes. Have a famous person or someone else you are interested in that you want to follow? No problem. The subscribe button makes it possible.
You are automatically subscribed to each of your friends, but the subscribe button can also be used to control what content you see from them. When you hit the subscribe button on each of their pages, you’ll be given the option to choose whether you want to see all of their updates, most updates, or important updates only. You can also choose what types of content, such as photos, you’d like to see by person. Sound complicated? Not really. If you don’t touch any of these features, you can hit the ignore button and nothing will change in your experience. But, if used, these tools give you significantly more control over what you see, and also what you show on Facebook and ultimately to the Web.
And lastly, you can use this button to get your own subscribers. This is entirely optional. If you would like to allow people to subscribe to your feed, visit this page: https://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe and click allow subscribers. Once you’ve chosen that, with each post you do and each photo you add you will have the ability to choose whether the content is presented to the public, your friends only, or a custom setting (such as only family or another list you have created). It’s a powerful tool to build your brand, but use it wisely – it defaults to public. You will also see a subscribers tab on your profile to see who is subscribing to your content – a great way to manage your own personal brand.
What’s next to come from Facebook? We’ve already begun to see the evolution of Smart lists and more tools to control your newsfeed, including geographic and other natural lists for me to choose where posts go. There is much more to come here, stay tuned!
