Forget "Subscribe," Facebook Is Soon To Be About The 'Follow"

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

Dec 5, 2012 at 5:24pm ET by Greg Finn

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 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.

About The Author: Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that specializes in social media and search marketing services and web-based application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 6+ years and specializes in Social Media Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn. See more articles by Greg Finn

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http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

I actually would prefer it be called follow instead of subscribe, subscribe makes it like a newspaper or magazine subscription and lacks a “human” element to the word, follow indicates a person.
Henley Wing

I agree, Justin. Subscribe just sounds so corporate, and impersonal. Follow definitely was the right term from the beginning.