While social media isn’t great for acquiring paying subscribers, it can be a great traffic driver for subscription content sites, particularly those with a freemium model.Yet to date, few subscription content sites have a formal referral tool. At one point, Facebook had an option to “suggest friends” on fan pages, but that tool was discontinued.But fortunately, and independent developer known as VTools created Smart Suggest — an easy-to-install Facebook tool that lets current fans recommend your Facebook fan page to their friends.The tool is presented on a fanpage, next to the tabs for Photos, Likes, etc.

When a visitor clicks on it, they’re prompted with the option to type a personal message and then recommend Facebook friends:

To install the app, just go to the Facebook page for Smart Suggest, and click on “Install Now.” If you’re already logged into your Facebook account (and have admin privileges for your site), the app will automatically ask which fanpages you want to install the app on:

You’ll be asked to confirm your decision, and then the app will take you to your fanpage with the Smart Suggest icon and tab already added (see green box again):

So far it doesn’t look like you can get email addresses or the like from the app, but it’s definitely a good way to create a formal word-of-mouth program on Facebook, and we’ll let you know what lessons we learn from using the app on our own Facebook fanpage.