I’ve decided to open up my Facebook account to subscribers. If you use Facebook for advice about this process, it all sounds very simple. I’ve used Facebook since it was introduced in Australian and for most of that time I have had a very private account but I want to use the platform to share all the amazing links and my own research on news and social media.  I did dozens of searches to find out how to define what is ‘public’ on Facebook and it wasn’t easy to do. So I wrote this post. Most Facebook references point back to this advice page:

http://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe.

At the bottom of that page you’ll see advice about what your subscribers see.

How to share

So far, so good. When you follow that link you’ll get the well-watched clip that explains the new inline audience selector. When you post something on Facebook you choose to post to public, friends or private lists. Simple? So open up to subscribers?

I don’t think having subscribers is a bad thing! But here is a big warning: It’s not just what you consider public with each post you make, but every public action on Facebook is now forwarded to anyone who subscribes to you.

• Comments on other public posts whether by friends or pages will be shared with your subscribers. If your friend has posted something racy, you now need to consider whether it’s worth a comment because it will be shared with subscribers.
• You can Like a new page and have it hidden from subscribes only if you do the following: Go to your timeline> go the small ‘about’ link just below your profile photo> go to ABOUT next to your profile name> go to the Likes option (all your liked pages will show up) > go to the edit button at the top right > Next to each group of favourites or likes you’ll see an audience selector. Here you choose to make Likes only visible to friends. Then save.
• Be mindful that even though you can hide the pages you like, any comments on that page (which by default are public) will be included in the ticker of your subscribers.

Facebook isn’t doing anything sneaky here. Those comments you made on the public Facebook page were technically there for all to see but only if someone happened to come across them. Your friends were notified in their ticker when you commented on the page, but that was about it.

The above advice is based on a series of experiments with people who were happy to be subscribers and not friends, and report back to me about what they saw and were able to follow. If any of this page is wrong, or you have more advice, please, please add a comment or drop me a note. Let’s help understand the whole process together.

Subscribe at
http://www.facebook.com/johnkerrison