Sep 20, 2011

Facebook Subscribe Button and its Use for Employment Branding

Yesterday I posted about why employers should encourage transparency between who its employees are and what they do to external talent

So when I was reading about Facebook's new feature - the subscribe button - I started thinking "Why can't employers use this?"
The Facebook subscribe button enables a person to "follow" (like twitter or Google+) a person's public updates. You can subscribe to my public posts here.

This feature is a great way for external talent to get to know who are the kind of people working in your organization and what is on their minds.

This is not a brand new idea. It's something similar to how Zappos lists all the employees who tweet on their site and also their updates.

We all know that there are a lot more people on Facebook (btw, employers in India did you know that India has the 3rd most people on Facebook at 35 million) than Twitter (which is around 10% of Facebook's users)

Of course, employees would have privacy concerns - and many use Facebook only for personal networking. Therefore the choice must be made entirely by the employee whether he/she would like to be the "employment brand ambassador" on the website/career site/social networking sites for the employer.