Facebook launches 'Subscribe' button

Facebook’s on a small ‘control how you share’ roll. Yesterday, they launched an improved friends list. Now, they’re rolling out a ‘subscribe’ button, which lets you set which users you’d like to see content from more. Until now, you could set your News Feed to not show updates from certain people. Subscribe works the other way around. If you’d like to see more updates from your best friends and less from your co-workers, subscribe helps you with that. Also, if you’d like to see updates from journalists and bloggers who aren’t your friends, you can subscribe to them, too. So all in all, what you can do with the subscribe button is choose what you see from people in your News Feed, hear from people even if you’re not friends and let people hear from you even if you’re not friends.

Facebook lets you subscribe

When you choose what you see in the News Feed, you can set it to how much you want to see, as well. For instance, when you hit Subscribe on someone’s profile, you can choose from “you’d like to see all updates (everything your friend posts), most updates (what you normally see) or important updates only” (only highlights like a new job). When you want to essentially follow a journalist or a blogger on Facebook like you would on Twitter, if you see a subscribe button on their profile, it means you can get their public updates in your News Feed. You will also be able to choose whether you want all, most or only important updates. Finally, you have the optional feature of placing the subscribe button on your own profile. When users subscribe to you, they will be able to see the posts you have listed as public. 

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The subscribe button will pop up on the top right side of the Facebook profile page. To add the subscribe button to your Facebook profile, go to the Subscription Page and click on ‘Allow subscribers’. Once you allow subscribers, you can choose who can comment and what notifications you get. You will also get a subscribers tab on your profile where you can see who’s subscribed to you.