You may have already heard about Subscriptions, the great new feature that Facebook rolled out last week. Essentially, it’s adding a new way for people to connect with one another on Facebook. Previously, your only option was to ‘friend’ other people and hope that they accepted your request. With Subscriptions, you can subscribe to people’s public newsfeed, but they don’t need to approve your request or subscribe you back; they simply need to set their newsfeed to be open to subscribers and choose to publish public content. This asymmetric, or one-way, relationship is what Twitter and Google+ have always used, but it’s totally new to Facebook.


Understanding Facebook’s Edgerank Filter

Getting content onto the news feed of Facebook users isn’t such an easy task. When Facebook initially rolled out the news feed functionality many years ago, it shared anything and everything that happened within a user’s social network. But once these networks became increasingly large and complex, it was clear that this filterless free-for-all wasn’t working any more. So Facebook developed an internal filtering mechanism called Edgerank. What Edgerank does is assign a priority-based number to every piece of content that might show up in a user’s news feed. If it is published by a close friend versus a distant friend, it ranks higher. If it is a piece of content with a lot of likes and comments, it ranks higher. If it is a piece of content that is similar to other content that was popular in the past, it ranks higher. And whenever there is more content then there are open spaces in the news feed, only the highest ranking content shows up.

With the new Subscriptions functionality, now users have more say over what content gets published and what doesn’t. By choosing to subscribe to another user’s updates, Facebook users are given the option to get all updates, most updates, or only important updates. The default is most updates, but by selecting all updates, every post by a subscribed user will get shown, no matter its Edgerank score. This is good news for users and for public figures with huge followings, because now it is up to broadcasters and their audience members to decide how much content is being posted. But this is bad news for brands, because the new subscription functionality is only available to individual accounts and not to Facebook Pages.


Most brands aren’t familiar with Edgerank and how it works, but those who are familiar have been very upset to discover that much of their branded content isn’t ever showing up on the news feeds of their followers. Unless a brand and a fan have regular contact, the brand’s content simply doesn’t rank high enough to ever get published. Should the Subscriptions functionality get extended to brands and Facebook Pages, than this problem would be solved, as brands could encourage their fans to both Like their Page and Subscribe to their news feed. But in the meantime, the only way to make sure your branded messages are being heard is with Sponsored Stories, a way to pay to get noticed.


Sponsored Stories are a specific type of Facebook Targeted Ad. Rather than it being an ad that gets served at any time to promote a brand Page or website, instead it is an ad that gets served just after a Facebook user interacts with a brand’s Page. One way to use this is to promote individual wall posts, while another way is to announce to the friends of a fan that the fan just liked your Page or your wall post. This is an amazing way to ensure that your content is getting viewed both by your existing fans as well as by their friends. Just like with Targeted Ads, you have detailed control over who sees the sponsored stories (age, location, interests, etc) and you only pay when the story is clicked on. Typically this costs about $1 per click, but the rates are variable and can be much lower if you desire.

Facebook is working hard to continue innovating. With Twitter and Google+ stealing some of the spotlight, Facebook needs to do more to win over partnered brands and users. Subscriptions and Sponsored Stories are evidence of this renewed effort and are likely just the beginning of Facebook offering better products and experiences. And with the Facebook F8 conference kicking off this Thursday, there’s a good chance that even more great features will be announced this week. Whether or not Facebook succeeds in staying the king of social in the coming years, brands and users will benefit from all the new features Facebook rolls out as it tries to stay competitive.