Earlier this week Facebook – without any fanfare, advance warning, or notice of any kind – changed the information on your personal page. They replaced the email you had listed on your page to your @facebook.com email.

Wait. You didn’t know you had a Facebook email? Most people have forgotten (as I had) that back in 2010 Facebook launched their own email system that was supposed to herald the death of gmail. This latest maneuver is most likely their attempt to rekindle interest in their system.

Here come the spammers

If you are like me, you don’t need another email address and especially not one that promises to be so spam-bot friendly (each address is simply your facebook user name with @facebook.com – seemingly so easy to swipe). So take a few minutes or seconds, depending on the speed of your processor, to reposition the email of your choice on your page.

Don’t forget to like our Facebook page to get more tips on marketing for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations.

Five Easy Steps

Fortunately, the fix is five quick steps:

1. On your profile page, click the “About” link.

2. Scroll down to the “Contact Info” and click “Edit.”

3. At email, click the drop down box with a circle next to your Facebook email and click “Hidden from Timeline.”

4. If you want your original email displayed on your page, click the drop down box with a slashed circle next to your original email and click “Shown on Timeline.”

5. Scroll down and click “save” at the bottom of that screen.

Voila! You’re done.

After fixing the emails on our personal pages, we checked our business pages and several clients’ pages for the Facebook email switch. So far, none of the business pages have been tampered with, but it would be a good idea to check both your business and personal profile pages right away to make sure they are displaying the information you want displayed.

This latest move by Facebook seems relatively harmless, but it reinforces for me the value of owning your own Internet real estate. We don’t advise clients or friends to put all of their eggs in the Facebook basket, but instead to use Facebook as a tool and to build their own basket. If you mission-driven organization needs help developing your nonprofit’s Internet real estate, contact us today.