New Facebook settings leave some page owners unable to respond to comments

Facebook have rolled out a recent change to their privacy settings that could seriously impact page owners and their ability to respond to comments. Over the last few hours reports have been coming in from different page owners that they’re not able to respond to comments that fans have left on their pages. This seems due to a new privacy setting by Facebook that means if a commenter has certain privacy settings set to ‘just friends’ a page admin won’t be able to reply to a comment left on their wall.

If you want to change this setting as a Facebook user, you can control it through your privacy settings. Update – this was the situation as reported at the time, any users that change their own privacy settings do so at their own discretion.Click on ‘Things everyone share’ in the privacy settings, then select ‘Can comment on posts’ and change to ‘Everyone’. But please be advised that this is a change to user’s privacy settings for all content, not just for a particular Facebook page.

As a page owner, at the moment the best you can do is to ask your fans to change this setting, or hope that they do this! I for one am not a fan of this change at all as it restricts the ability to engage with users who have a clear interest in talking to you on your own page. Let’s hope this one doesn’t stick!

Update: this situation applies at the time of writing and we understand it may be subject to change. We will keep you updated of any changes. This is based on reports we’re seeing from Page owners, and our own experience of changing the settings.

Update 2: we have a further update from Facebook and this is now being investigated. We hope it will revert back soon and will keep you updated.

Update 3: As you can see here Facebook have acknowledged this as a problem here so it is quite clearly just a bug on the site that will revert to normal soon. It’s a pretty big bug though that has affected lots of pages and people seem to be scrambling for information. Expect this to be fixed soon.

Update 4: The bug is apparently now fixed! Hurrah!