I’ve been using Facebook since its early years. So today it has the most complete and accurate set of connections to people I’ve known throughout my life http://grooming-spaniel.blogspot.com/2012/02/hazardous-indoor-plants.html. Exactly because of its success in assembling this group, I’ve avoided turning on its five month-old Subscribe feature — until now.
For those of you who want to gain a big personal Facebook following but don’t want to spam your friends, here’s my reasoning for taking my Facebook profile public.
Subscribe, if you’re not familiar, lets a Facebook user allow other users to follow their publicly-shared information without that person having to follow any of them back. It’s a more visceral way for users to connect with real people versus the relatively stilted and underused individual fan pages.
Like Twitter, and in contrast to Facebook’s 5,000 friend limit, any person who has enabled Subscribe can get as many followers as possible. Facebook may have adopted this asymetrical relationship model years after competitors, but because its 850 million user base is so much larger than anyone else’s, it can offer many more potential followers. It has also been boosting Subscribe growth by recommending users Subscribe to relevant users via a module on the right side of its home page.
All sorts of real celebrities, web mini-celebrities and even fellow tech bloggers have been racking up tens of thousands of subscribers. And these numbers aren’t just for vanity, they drive serious usage. When TechCrunch writers who have enabled Subscribe share their posts with their Facebook audience, they tend to get the most traffic out of the dozens of posts we publish each day.
I won’t reveal the specific stats for authors, although you can get a sense from the share numbers to the left of each post. But here’s a related measure to illustrate the high engagement that comes from Facebook. TechCrunch has a whopping 2,041,083 Twitter followers but only 421,657 Facebook fans. However, total Facebook pageviews to TechCrunch, whether from authors or the fan page, beat out the