You must have heard about following people on Twitter and thinking the title of this post may be a mistake – it should be Twitter instead of Facebook. But I am aware that I am going to talk about “How to Follow on Faceook”.
On Twitter, when you follow someone, their tweets and the retweets they do (depending upon your following settings) appears on your time line. If some user has protected their tweets, you have to send a follow request to them. If they allow you to follow, then you can see their tweets and those can come on your time line.
But on Facebook, there is no follow concept. It’s a social media platform where you add friends. And on your homepage, you see updates from all those people (as per their privacy settings), called as “News Feed”. When you add someone, you can see their public updates on your news feed, until the person clicks on Delete Request. It’s similar to the way you see updates from people you follow on Twitter on your time line. When anyone on twitter blocks you, you can’t see their tweets on your time line, but you can see their (public) tweets. You can translate this situation in the Facebook way – you can see public updates from anyone you sent a friend request to on your News Feed. But when they click on the “Delete Request” button, their updates will not appear on your News Feed. However you can see their public updates on their wall.
So next time you want to follow someone on Facebook, sent them a friend request and add a note saying not to click on “Delete Request” button if they don’t want to add you as a friend, instead they could click on the “Not Now” button (and hide all requests to make that page clutter less). I may try this next time, some people may treat this way as stupid, but I will share the result – but before that I need to find some one worth following on Facebook.
Tip: Sagarika
Update: Recently Facebook introduced new Subscribe Button. Now you can follow anyone on Facebook, by using the Subscribe option. But if they don’t want anyone to follow them, then they can disallow the Subscribe button on their profiles. Similar to the way, people protect their tweets on Twitter.
Tip: Susanta
10 responses to “How to follow someone on Facebook”
But what if I want to follow an organization? There isn’t a friend request option.
It’s simple! If the organization has a Facebook page, you can like their page and follow them. Not just follow, you can interact with them too.
I just signed up to facebook for the first time. I can’t see any “Like” or “Follow” buttons.
How does it work?
If someone has activated to “Subscribe” her, then you will see a “Subscribe” button next to her profile. And you will see a lot of ‘Like’ buttons around Facebook.
I see no subscribe button. The only “like” links are to posts and articles.
This means she have not activated “Subscribe” feature of Facebook.
Hi, I want to allow subscribes to my business fan page rather than my personal profile. How would i go about doing this?
I don’t think there is such way. But you can share your page on your timeline and ask your followers to like the page.
There is a new option on people’s pages, that are not friends to “follow” them… still not sure what it means though.
I think you are talking about new Subscribe feature. Learn more about that here: https://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe