There are several people on Facebook whose updates I would like to read, but I don’t necessarily want to be “friends” with them.
Enter Facebook’s “Subscribe” button. If a user displays a “Subscribe” button on his or her profile, you can now get their public updates, much like when you follow someone on Twitter and their updates display in your Twitter steam.
The key thing to remember when you subscribe to someone’s updates is that you’ll only see their PUBLIC updates.
How to make the “Subscribe” button show on your own profile
This is currently an optional feature, so you’ll need to activate it. The easiest way is to log in to your Facebook account and click http://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe.
You’ll see a big box on the right side of your screen. Click the green “Allow Subscribers” button.
Next, a pop-up lets you customize your subscriber settings. You can choose whether you want anyone to be able to comment on your public updates, and whether you want to be notified when someone subscribes to your updates.
Beneath your profile picture, you’ll notice that new tabs have been added for “Subscriptions” (and if you activated the new subscriber notification, above, you’ll also see a “Subscribers” tab). You can edit both those tabs.
Note that when you allow people to subscribe to your public updates, you can’t pick and choose who gets to subscribe. ANYONE who you haven’t blocked will be able to see your public updates in their News Feed.
How to determine whether an update is “public”
Two ways.
- Customize your account’s privacy settings http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy.
- As you update your status, click the icon to the left of the blue “Post” button and choose the “Public” option. You can customize how every update you post displays.
How to subscribe to a non-friend’s updates
If you visit someone else’s profile and want to subscribe to their updates, click their “Subscribe” button (if they display it).
You can then customize now frequently you want to see updates from them and what types of updates you want to see.
How to decipher the “How many updates?” option:
- All Updates = everything that person posts.
- Most Updates = the amount you’d normally see (this is rather vague, but I got it straight from the Facebook blog)
- Only Important = just highlights, like a new job or move
How to customize which updates from your friends display in your News Feed
By default, you are subscribed to your Facebook friends’ updates. But you can also customize which of their updates appear in your News Feed.
The only way I’ve discovered to customize this is to click on each individual friend (which is very time-consuming if you have a lot of friends) and click/unclick the check boxes to determine the types of updates you want to receive.
If you come up with an easier way to do this, please share it, so we can learn together.
Did you find this tutorial helpful?
If so, I hope you’ll click the buttons below to like, share, and re-tweet it. You can also print out a nicely formatted PDF copy of this post to use as a reference guide.
