Facebook has always kept a difference between fan page’s and adding friends to your personal profile, and share things personally with friends and family. The public page is called a fan page and personal profile can be kept private so that you can share crazy stuff on the wall, which only the friends who have added you can see those updates. And if you have a Blog or a website, then you can create a fan page and let others like your page. And then the page creator or admin can share things on that fan page’s wall.
What if you want to share some updates to a wider audience using personal profile page? For doing this, one needs to make a public profile but the minus point of doing this is that every update you share on the wall can be seen by public and even to those who are not your friends.
But now facebook has added a new feature which will allow users to subscribe to the personal profile. This new feature works beautifully. Let’s say you want to share updates (links, photos, videos, text) to a wider audience – in this case you can allow a subscribe button to your profile page and the best part is that the subscribers don’t even need to be your friends. Anyone can subscribe to your profile, even the one who is not your friend.
In simple terms, it can be said that “Like” is to fan page, and “subscribe” is to personal profile page. Fan page subscribers get each and every update whereas “subscribers” can get only the update which is shared using the privacy set as “public”.
Add Subscribe button/option to facebook profile
To allow subscribers, login to your facebook account, click here and then click on Allow Subscribers button. Next screen will ask whether you want to enable comment posting on public updates or not. Select the preferred option and click ok.
This doesn’t mean that you would need to subscribe to hear from friends. You’re already subscribed to receive updates from friends. But now you can hear from celebrities, journalists, political figures and other people too (who are not your friends). Click the Subscribe button on someone’s profile to get their public updates in your News Feed.
How to post update so that subscribers can see that update? When posting an update, just click on that custom button and then select Public.
Now this update can be seen by your subscribers. It will appear in their news feed. This lets you share with a broader audience, while reserving personal updates for people you know well. So don’t worry, you can choose which update is shared and which not.
There’s no limit to how many subscribers you can have, but a person can subscribe to as many as 5000 people (profiles). Also before allowing subscribers, its recommended to check out how public profile looks like. To do this, just visit your profile, and then click on “View as” button and then on “Public” link.
Increase facebook profile subscribers
Now that you have enabled subscribers, its time to post this profile URL to your blog/website or send an email to your friends to subscribe to your updates. E.g. my profile page URL is facebook.com/msaqibk. Those who want to subscribe can just head over to this profile page and click on that “subscribe” button. Easy peasy, right.
Subscribe doesn’t mean that you can subscribe using an RSS reader (like Google Reader), but you will be subscribed using facebook only. The updates will be received on News Feed. Blogger’s and website owners can get benefit from this as they can let others subscribe to their profile and therefore promoting their Blog/website.
Here, take a look at difference between “profile with subscribers” and “fan page”.
Leave a Reply