Facebook is one of the most popular communication platforms available to small businesses. Some have even gone so far as to adopt it as their main communication platform. Facebook is more than happy to provide business users with the medium, but has been making changes to the overall layout that aren’t in their best interest. The latest change is in regards to your contact information.

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 username@facebook.com.

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:

1. Logging in to Facebook, and viewing their Timeline profile (clicking on your username from the main screen.)
2. Clicking About followed by Edit under the Contact Info field.
3. 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.
4. Selecting Shown on Timeline for the email they want shown, or Hidden from Timeline for the address they don’t want shown.
5. Pressing Save.