At any given time, we Facebook users are bombarded with an unending stream of congestion that is the News Feed. It’s populated with a mishmash of status updates, countless social gaming prompts, and shared links, videos, and images from every single one of your contacts.  All these can make online marketing through Facebook quite challenging and rather tedious to work through especially for a brand wanting to make proactive online marketing campaigns work.

You really can’t hide them all as they can be very useful for your brand’s strategies. What you need is some kind of filtering system—features the recently rolled out Subscribe button can easily provide.

“Until now, it hasn’t been easy to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed.” said software engineer Zach Rait on the Facebook Blog. “You’re already getting your friends’ posts in News Feed. With the Subscribed button, you can choose how much you see from them…”

You’ll find the Subscribe button on the upper right corner of user profiles and will allow you to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed. Perhaps you’d like to continue seeing interesting news updates from your friends, but not at all interested in hearing your oversharing coworker rave about Red Lobster’s Cheddar Biscuits, or finding out what virtual item your cousins needs on The Sims Social. Or maybe you’d like to be able to read Wall posts from those you don’t know personally like celebrities, politicians, and athletes.

You can customize the amount of updates you’ll be seeing; you can choose to see everything your contacts post, most of their updates, or perhaps just the important ones. Under these, you can even specify what type of updates you’d want on your News Feed including Life Events, Status Updates, Photos and Videos, and prompts from social Games. You can also subscribe even to the profiles of people you don’t actually follow online.

On the flipside, you can also put the subscribe button on your own profile, to let your followers filter through your posts. It won’t, however, be immediately on your page so you’re going to have to enable it by visiting the Subscription Page. People who have subscribed to you will immediately see the posts you set as “Public” in their News Feeds. You, on the other hand, will be able to see who subscribes to you. In addition to this, you can also choose which of your subscribers can leave comments and what notifications you get.

Tags: Facebook, online marketing, social media marketing, social networks, Subscribe Button