Social media training Birmingham - Facbeook subscribe guide

I often speak to people who are using their personal Facebook profile to link with people who aren’t their ‘real’ friends, but are people they want to network with or sell to. Anyone with a personal brand might be tempted to do this – politicians, writers, celebrities and more.

But often this causes problems – Facebook is designed for sharing things with your close friends, things you may not want the whole world to see. Until recently, there has been no way to separate the updates you want your real friends to see, and the updates you want your fans or supporters to see.

The subscribe button – great for building a personal fanbase

Facebook has introduced the ability for people to subscribe to your updates. It works in a similar way to Pages, but relates to an individual rather than a business or organisation.

If someone subscribes to your profile, you don’t have to subscribe back – it’s not like friending someone. It means that they are effectively following you (remind you of twitter, anyone?), and that they will be able to see your status updates but you won’t see theirs.

Setting up the subscribe button

To set up subscriptions to your feed, go to facebook.com/subscribe. Click on the ‘Allow subscribers’ link in the box on the right.

Now if someone asks to be your friend on Facebook and you’d rather they became your subscriber instead, you can send them a message in response explaining why you have subscriptions to your feed and asking them to become subscribers.

You might also want to send a message to existing friends asking them to become subscribers instead. You can send a message in Facebook to a number of your Friends at once, so you can use this to explain what you’re doing and how they become subscribers.

To subscribe to your feed, they simply click the ‘subscribe’ button on your profile, which will appear as soon as you allow subscriptions.

Communicating with subscribers

Once you’ve set up subscriptions, you’ll need to make sure you post separate updates that everyone can see and others that just your friends can see. Even though only your subscribers will get your public updates in their feed, these are public and anyone can see them – just like tweets.

To do this, you select the drop-down box below the field where you are typing your status update, and pick whether you want your update top be public or just for friends.

It’s importnat to know that Friends are counted among your subscribers. So if you post a public update, your friends will still get it in their feed – you don’t need to post two separate times.

The Facebook subscribe button – a guide

The subscribe button – great for building a personal fanbase

Setting up the subscribe button

Communicating with subscribers