Facebook To Remove the Option To Allow Public Followers on Personal Profiles

Get ready for a change to your Facebook profile, with the platform removing the option to have public followers on personal profiles over the coming months.

Right now, you can enable anybody to follow your personal Facebook profile, by switching your “Following” setting to public.

As Facebook explains:

“When you follow someone, you see their posts in your Feed. You automatically follow people you're friends with. You can also follow the posts of people you're interested in. You can also choose to allow people who aren't your friends to see your posts in their Feed.”

So it’s a means for non-connections to stay up to date with your Facebook posts. Which is probably not necessary for non-creator or business accounts, so Meta’s decided to remove the option.

As you can see in this screenshot, posted by Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith, some users are now being informed that they’ll either need to remove their public followers, which they can do in one tap, or keep them, but switch their personal profile to “Professional Mode” instead, essentially transitioning their profile to a Page.

So no more of those old school frenemies keeping tabs on your personal updates, which, really, is probably a better way to go. And if you really want to enable followers, if that’s really important to you, you can switch to a Page instead, which Meta has made easy with this process.

That might open up more ad opportunities for Meta, by giving more people the option to promote their posts to get increased reach. Personal profiles don’t have ad options, but Professional accounts do, and by prompting people to make the switch, that’ll mean a lot more people will see that “Boost” button appearing in-stream.

The update could also make it easier for Meta to promote creators in the app, by removing these public posts from view. If people can’t follow personal profiles anymore, that opens up more slots to show them AI-recommended creator posts, and with recommended posts driving all the engagement on Facebook right now, that could be another factor in this decision.

Though it’s not being rolled out to everyone just yet. As further explained by Smith, Meta’s conducting a staged roll out of this update, so they’re not dealing with a mass shift in audience settings all at once. Some people are getting notified of the change now, but others won’t hear about it for some time yet.

Either way, it’s something to consider, do you want to keep your Facebook followers, or should you just keep a personal profile instead.

You may not have to make the decision for some time, but it is coming, probably sometime next year.