Facebook Update: Subscriptions Explained

Facebook is to give users the chance to automatically publish their status updates on both Facebook and their Twitter pages as part of their new Subscriptions feature. Which means that not only is Facebook allowing its users to make their updates, such as photographs links and general news, public to subscribers, it also allows users to subscribe to other Facebook users without having to send them a friend request first.

The feature, which is very similar to Twitter's existing 'Follow' function, is an update that is optional for all users, which means that the user can choose to use the Subscribe button, or not. If the user chooses to use the Subscribe feature, they will be able to control what type of stories and updates they get from their friends and other pages that they follow, such as fan pages and groups.

The purpose of the Subscription function is to help user decide how much or even, how little content that they want to see on their news feed, as well as the type of content they want to see, as they can choose to just see photographs, links to news stories, status updates from certain people and so on. At the same time, this means that the information that you share with others will also change, as you will be able to share your updates, photos and more by adding the Subscribe button to your profile.

But while it's now possible for users to see more content thanks to the Subscribe button, the ability to update Twitter through Facebook is seen as one of the highlights of this new update. While this move has been seen as an attempt to rival Twitter's micro-blogging style, Facebook is known to have a much bigger user base than Twitter, but it has not cornered Twitter's unique follow option.

While this new update is still very much in its infancy, and only time well tell whether it will be a hit with everyday users, and even companies who rely on social media to advertise their products. Being able to update two networking sites at the same time is very beneficial, because it will obviously save time and effort, but there are existing methods of keeping both these sites updated simultaneously, such as the existing Twitter App for Facebook.

So if you have a Twitter account, will you be linking it to your Facebook page? Or if you've linked them already, let me know what you think of this latest update.