Facebook To Mimic Twitter? “Subscribe To Your Friend(s)”

We all love the news feed and updates from our friends, specially the close ones (maybe some more than close ones!). But, most absolutely hate updates from the many applications that run on Facebook. Like the ones that say there’s a new black sheep in your friend’s farm!

Facebook is working on refining just this and in a way is trying to mimic Twitter, lets emphasis ‘in a way’. A new feature that will allow you to “subscribe” to your friend is being tested which will notify on any updates from a friend you subscribe to, be it a new note or a status update. Basically, this gives the user an ability to manage the news feed.

What it also means is that there could be a new metric to measure the popularity of the person or fan page? It could be the number of subscribers just like the number of likes.

From a commercial point of view, businesses with fan pages on Facebook will be able to direct their promotions and adverts to people who are more likely to buy their product. This may mean more clicks for considerable lesser impressions and eventually more conversions at lower cost, giving a much more valuable ROI for Social Media Optimisation on Facebook.

This feature is currently in the test phase. Here’s Facebook’s statement on this as posted on allfacebook.com
“This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes).”

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