In social media news, it’s all about the buttons—Social media share buttons, that is.  You’ve seen them to the side or at the bottom of nearly every page or article you’ve perused while on the internet, inviting you to “Share This” or “Tweet” the content to your friends and followers.

Facebook has a new button.  Many of you may have noticed a new feature on the right-hand side of your Facebook page lately, displaying the picture of someone you’re not friends with and rather than inviting you to become friends with them, Facebook now invites you to “Subscribe” to them.  Once you click this button, you’re now able to see that person’s status updates, much like a Twitter feed for Facebook.  It is also mirroring Google+’s one-way follow feature which allows users to follow the updates of people without actually becoming friends with them.

This isn’t just for following celebrities or powerful CEOs; you can now subscribe to your friends’ feeds and no matter who it is you’re following, the updates you receive can be customized.  For friends you subscribe to, you can choose to see “All Updates” or “Only Important” ones.  For non-friends, you can view “All Updates” or choose to hide certain ones, such as photo updates.  Many of you may now be thinking, “Wait a minute, does this mean that people can subscribe to my status updates, even if I don’t want them to?”  Fear not, privacy-inclined readers.  You can turn this feature off on your profile as easily as you can alter other privacy settings.

This isn’t the only new feature to Facebook.  You might also have noticed that you now have the ability to customize who you share your updates with on a per-update basis, rather than creating a general restriction in your privacy setting that blocks certain people from viewing your content all the time.

Facebook’s Product Manager, Naomi Gleit, commented, “Facebook has always been working on giving users more control,” but doesn’t the time of these updates seem a bit strange?  Haven’t we seen this all before?

As I mentioned previously, the subscribe feature is extremely similar to what Twitter is all about, not to mention Google+.  The new customizable sharing feature may also cause Google+ to bristle, given that this was their big differentiating factor when launching.

Sadly, Google has proven to be less-than-stellar in the social media arena.  Many had high hopes for Google+, confident that once its business pages were open, things would change.  Perhaps they still will, but the probability of gaining converts from Facebook has now significantly decreased with Facebook’s new features that steal all of Google+’s thunder and then some.  In all likelihood, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s new features as Thursday’s F8 conference for developers promises to unveil some significant redesigns that will no doubt create a tremendous amount of feedback, both good and bad.

So should Facebook be ashamed of itself for taking ideas from its competitors?  On the contrary, I believe they should be held up as an example of what to do in social media.  In this ever-complex, ever-competitive arena, the ability to adapt is of the greatest importance.  Whether it is the features on a social media site, or the content your business is putting out, it all needs to adapt to the changing landscape.  If you’re in any doubt of this, look at MySpace.

Facebook has adapted, for better or worse.  On one hand, this may be the answer individuals with prominent businesses have been searching for: the opportunity to share updates with some people and not others within the Facebook realm.  On the other hand, it could cause another privacy uproar should users not realize that they can and should turn off the Subscribe feature on their page if they don’t want to share with strangers.

Either way, Facebook has made the right move and built yet another level onto their already rich product offering.  It’s Social Media Week here in Chicago and I was fortunate to attend a presentation in which Brad Keown of Facebook was a speaker.  He made a great point that I think every business would do well to remember: “Few companies die from moving fast, but many die from moving slow.”

Tags: Facebook, Google, social, Social Media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 at 9:02 am and is filed under Facebook, Google+1, Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.