New Facebook Features: “Subscribe” Button and News Feed Options

New Facebook Features: “Subscribe” Button and News Feed Options

As of yesterday, Facebook is providing users with more options to share and manage content. You’ll soon see the introduction of a “subscribe” button, now allowing individuals to share public content with those who choose to subscribe to their Facebook feed, without that person having to confirm any request. It’s important to note that this change is only relevant to user profiles (for the time present, anyway) and should not affect Pages, brands, and companies. Facebook still recommends the use of Pages for businesses and brands. If a user chooses to “Subscribe”, they’ll see all public updates from a person in their news feed. Other users can still block subscribers and control comments on their updates. Facebook has not limited the number of subscribers a person can have—this change helps overcome Facebook’s 5,000 friend maximum. It’s still unclear whether or not the “subscribe” or “like” feature will be distributed to website pages outside of Facebook.

To take advantage of this, you’ll first need to change your settings to allow subscribers. Go to www.facebook.com/about/subscriptions.

Why is this important? This changes the nature of Facebook, turning it into more of a one-way publishing and reading experience—very similar to Twitter or Google+. For public businesses, journalists, celebrities, politicians, etc, separate Pages for their public persona was required. This new feature allows people to manage both public posts and friend relationships from the same interface.

The Facebook “Subscribe” button also builds upon recent Facebook updates that allow users to indicate which posts they’d prefer to be public (and which are meant for just friends) as they’re composing their message or sharing their content.

Facebook has now given public figures two options and Facebook team encourages them to do which best suits their needs. Should you have multiple pages and benefit from the Page analytics, continue to use them. Or, open up your personal profile to subscribers.

Other Recent Facebook Changes:

Along with the subscribe button, Facebook has revealed several other new features for a more fine-tuned news feed experience.
Users are now able to select (friend by friend) what they’re able to see. These options include seeing most of what you post, important updates only, certain types of content only—particularly useful for blocking friends who post a lot of game-related posts (Facebook game updates can be annoying), but see everything posted by a close friend. This is useful because you don’t always care about all of your Facebook friends the same.

These changes are expected to roll out today and should appear in everyone’s account over the next few weeks.