Facebook and YouTube seem to be working in conjunction, with some Facebook users noticing a “Subscribe on YouTube” button on videos in their News Feeds.
The button only appears when you utilize YouTube’s Facebook sharing tool – a simple copy-and-paste into a status update won’t enable the feature.
“It seems that this feature is enabled automatically when you click the ‘Share to Facebook’ icon on YouTube,” Lot Press Marketing’s David Iwanow noted. “There doesn’t seem to be another way to currently do this that I could find.”
Clicking the button takes you directly to the page of the user who originally posted the video, and allows you to subscribe right away. From there, you can also see other content they’ve posted.
Interestingly, the feature is not enabled on other social sites such as Twitter and Google Plus. Considering YouTube is a Google subsidiary, it’s a matter of speculation why they don’t have the feature as well. It’s easy to point at the number of active users – 1.23 billion for Facebook, compared to 500 million for Google Plus and 200 million for Twitter.
“Why is this not done automatically, and why only if you use the manual share button from within YouTube,” Iwanow pondered. “I also wonder why this Subscribe on YouTube feature is not yet available for Google Plus or Twitter.”
For now, subscribing to YouTube channels just got easier, and can be done with the convenience of a simple Facebook post. While the amount of users who will actually use the feature to subscribe to videos is unknown, it provides an interesting alternative.
