Stefanie Hahn

By Stefanie Hahn

The letter X hasn’t fared too well in the dot-com era.  Once the mark of secret pirate treasures and “sign here if you would please” contracts, it has been relegated to second-class status ever since Microsoft introduced Windows95 as the letter you looked for when you want to make things go away.

Facebook also selected the X as the “go away” letter.  If you are using Facebook for business, this X can be really, really bad.

If you have never seen the X on Facebook, it hides in the upper right corner of every post made by your friends (and the pages you like).  You don’t see it unless you hover over the post – it is pretty stealthy.

When you click the X on any Facebook post the system automatically presents you with a few different options:

Hide this post

Hide all from [USER]

Hide all from [APPLICATION] *if it was posted from a third party site like YouTube

I can tell you from personal experience that making the decision between the first two is very hard sometimes.  I can think of a few occasions where I clicked the X thinking I was going to just hide a post – and then made a split-second decision to just hide the user instead.  If this happens to you, the best social media strategy in the world won’t get you very far.

So why do I hide users? Continue reading »