Facebook introduced the "Subscribe" button to compete with Google+ "Add to Circles". To put it in simple terms - The subscribe button enables others to see your Facebook updates on their news feed without having to add you to their friends list.
The button makes it easy for people to share their updates to interested people outside their friend circle creating a dedicated audience. The only condition is that you should set your sharing settings as open to public.
Adding Subscribe button to webpage?
If you are a blogger or have a website and you use your Facebook profile to share updates to the world, you can easily embed the subscribe button on your site's pages. It helps interested readers to subscribe for your Facebook updates directly with a single click instead of visiting your Facebook profile.
The best place to place this subscribe button is next to your name on your posts.There are two things to do in order to place a Subscribe button -
- Allow others to subscribe to your updates from here.
- Generate the subscribe button code for your profile from here.
You can skip step 2 if you already have installed the XFBML version of any Facebook plugins (LIKE button, comments Like Box etc). In that case, you can easily add the Subscribe button any place you want with this code -
<fb:subscribe href=”https://www.facebook.com/zuck” width=”450″></fb:subscribe>
Just replace "zuck" with your Facebook username.
Dec 14, 2011