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 way for non-connections to keep abreast of your Facebook posts. Which, presumably, is an unnecessary use-case for non-creator or business accounts, so Meta's removing the feature.

some users are now being notified that they will have either to delete their public followers, which can be done in one tap, or retain them, but switch their personal profile to "Professional Mode" instead - in effect, converting their profile into 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.

And that may open up many more ad opportunities to Meta because giving people the option to "boost" the posts to increase their reach makes them more likely to do so. Personal profiles have no ad options, but Professional accounts do, and prompting people to switch means 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.

At least, not to everyone. According to Smith, who further elaborated on the whole process, Meta is conducting a staged roll out of this update so they aren't facing a broad shift of audience settings all at once. Some are getting notified of the change now while others will never even know about it until much later.

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.