Social media is here to stay, companies and their customers use it to communicate with one another and build a form of rapport that can traditionally only be built through face-to-face interaction.
Facebook is arguably the most popular social media website and is well known for constantly changing features. A recent change has many companies up in arms.
On the normal Facebook profile, before the recent change, when a user clicked About to find more information about a company, how to contact them for example, they would be presented with an email address for the company. That’s changed, now your primary email address presented will be [email protected].
This is a potential problem for companies that rely on their Facebook profile to encourage users to contact them directly. If the user does want to email, they only have access to the Facebook email address, which sends messages to the Messages centre (located the the top left of the Facebook window) of the profile. Hardly ideal.
The upside to this is that the change of email address hasn’t resulted in a new set of security rules, or made any changes to security. Also, Facebook isn’t forcing users to keep their Facebook email address as their primary contact, they can still set which email address to use as their primary by:
- Logging in to Facebook, and viewing their Timeline profile (clicking on your username from the main screen.)
- Clicking About followed by Edit under the Contact Info field.
- Selecting the blue upside-down triangle beside their email address. Note: the “no” sign means the email address won’t show up on your Timeline.
- Selecting Shown on Timeline for the email they want shown, or Hidden from Timeline for the address they don’t want shown.
- Pressing Save.
While some users are making a mountain out of a molehill on this issue, it’s important to be aware of this and if you would prefer your primary contact email to not be the Facebook email, change it. If you’d like to learn more about using Facebook in your business, please contact us.
