Forget “Subscribe,” Facebook Is Soon To Be About The ‘Follow”

It appears that Facebook will be conforming with social naming norm. The Verge is reporting that all of the “subscribe” actions are going to be converted to “follow” actions.  This will not change the “friend” functionality, rather is simply a name change for the subscribe feature. The name change appears to be a play to […]

Chat with MarTechBot

facebook-logo-squareIt appears that Facebook will be conforming with social naming norm. The Verge is reporting that all of the “subscribe” actions are going to be converted to “follow” actions.  This will not change the “friend” functionality, rather is simply a name change for the subscribe feature.

The name change appears to be a play to entice more users to follow celebrities on Facebook. Following has been the long-time verb of record when describing a 1-way connection in social, not Facebook’s “subscribe” verbiage.  Additionally, the “subscribe” feature could be misleading as users can subscribe to an entity but not see low quality posts in the news feed — even though they subscribed.

Facebook made the following statement about the name shift:

“Starting today we are updating the term “Subscribe” to become “Follow” across the site as we found it is a term that resonates better with people on the service. Nothing is changing about how the feature works.”

For more info, see The Verge.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Finn
Contributor
Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.