How to Find Someone’s Email on Facebook and Why You Shouldn’t Even Bother

Facebook is a goldmine of leads. In the digital era we live in, everyone’s online. The vast majority of people have profiles on various social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. 

With the bulk of your target audience already on Facebook, it’s only natural that you’d want to take advantage of that fact and generate as many leads from the platform as possible. There are multiple ways to turn Facebook users into leads for your business, with the most obvious being searching for their email addresses.

So, how do you find someone’s email address on Facebook?

There are three ways to do so:

• Manually

• Through Facebook ads

• By leveraging email lookup tools

We’ll discuss all three methods in detail here, show you which one is the most effective, and introduce you to a solution that can help you generate thousands of leads and create an additional revenue stream. 

Let’s get to it!

Finding Email Addresses on Facebook Manually

The first thing that comes to mind when you want to find someone’s email address on Facebook is to visit their profile. Most people have their email address publicly displayed. 

Here’s how you would find someone’s email address from their Facebook profile:

1. Click on the search bar and type in their first and last name

2. Visit the person’s profile

3. Click on About, then select Contact and Basic Info

4. If they made their email address public, you would see it next to the email icon

There are a couple of reasons why this method is anything but good:

1. You need to know your leads’ full names 

2. The email addresses may be outdated

3. People can choose to hide their email addresses

Knowing Who Your Leads Are

Searching for email addresses on Facebook manually takes an eternity. Even if you have full names of everyone who’s potentially interested in your business, how much time do you think it would take you to check every single profile, one by one?

The answer is — more time than you can afford to spend. And that’s if we assume that you know exactly which of the millions of people on Facebook belong to your target audience. 

That said, you’re probably aware of the fact that this is impossible. How do you even begin searching for leads? You can’t just start typing random names and writing down everyone’s email address — that’s just nonsensical. 

While there is information on people’s profiles that can loosely tell you what topics and products they’re interested in, trying to assess whether they’ll be interested in your business based on a few pages that they liked is madness. Even if it wasn’t futile, it would be extremely time-consuming. 

So, unless you’re looking for a specific person’s email address and want to reach out to them with a tailored business proposal, you should forget about manually searching email addresses on Facebook. 

Even if you’re looking to get in touch with an agency, marketer, entrepreneur, or a business owner, you’d have more luck finding their email address on LinkedIn or their company website. 

Outdated Email Addresses

Another big issue with email addresses on Facebook is that most of them are outdated. The vast majority of people on the platform created their profiles over ten years ago. 

Millennials have probably used “cool” email addresses back in the day when Facebook first hit the internet. Over 15 years later, you can bet that not a single one of them uses their old Facebook email address for business purposes — and these are people in their late 20s who probably make up a good part of your target audience. 

The same principle applies to everyone on Facebook. Why would anyone bother to keep their email address up to date? The way most people see it — they just used the address to create a Facebook account many years ago. Individuals don’t think in terms of “someone might look for my email address on Facebook and send me exciting offers via email.” 

For business entities, it’s a bit different. They acknowledge this possibility and are far more likely to keep their business email on Facebook up to date in case someone wishes to contact them with an inquiry or a business proposal.

With that in mind, if you’re in a b2b industry, it might make sense to look for pages of businesses that align with your buyer persona (Facebook pages, not individual profiles) in search of their contact information. Regardless, it would still make more sense to do so on LinkedIn. 

Hidden Email Addresses

Everything we’ve talked about so far is only applicable under the assumption that people are publicly displaying their email addresses on Facebook. This isn't always the case. It’s not uncommon for people to leave their contact information empty or choose to hide it.

No Contact Information

If a profile doesn’t show the person’s email address, there’s literally nothing you can do, apart from sending them a message. We strongly advise against contacting random people on Facebook and asking them for their email addresses out of the blue. 

There used to be an option to send someone a request to share their email address with you, but that’s no longer available. Anyhow, it was little more than a shortcut to send them a message and ask for contact information, so we would caution you against that even if the option still existed. 

Generating Leads Through Facebook Ads

Most businesses and entrepreneurs who haven’t fiddled with Facebook ads believe that they can only be used to sell products and services.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, there are six types of Facebook ads and three different ad objectives. 

Types of Facebook ads:

• Photo

• Video

• Slideshow

• Carrousel

• Dynamic product ads

• Lead generation ads

Facebook ads objectives:

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Conversion

We won’t get into detail regarding each type of Facebook ad here. What you should set your eyes on is lead gen ads. Facebook gives businesses an opportunity to generate leads through its Ad Manager. 

Facebook lead ads are essentially lead magnets that you can promote on the platform. Instead of the Shop Now button, they feature a CTA that prompts the user to sign up in order to receive a ton of value free of charge.

Facebook lead ads work by presenting an opt-in form once someone clicks on your ad. Instead of taking them to your website or directly to the product page, these ads act like mini landing pages, so to speak. 

The ad tells the Facebook user what they’re going to get in exchange for sharing their contact information, and allows them to do so right then and there, without having to leave Facebook. 

Facebook Lead Ad Example

Image source: Nesweed.org

The biggest advantage of Facebook ads over manually searching for email addresses on the platform or utilizing a software solution to scrape Facebook for you is that you’re getting qualified, warm leads. 

Lead Quality Is Paramount 

We understand that running Facebook ads isn’t a viable strategy for every business. They do require a decent marketing budget and aren’t exactly the first option for businesses and entrepreneurs who are just starting out. 

That said, there’s no denying that, when executed properly, Facebook ad campaigns work wonders. Everything else aside, we can’t underestimate Facebook’s targeting capabilities. With Facebook ads — lead gen or any other type — you can leverage the platform’s advanced filtering options to ensure that your ads get in front of the right people.

Before creating the ad itself, you’ll have the option to create a custom audience based on demographics, psychographics, and a variety of interests, behaviors, and online activities. In other words, rather than collecting email addresses at random, you’ll be getting your ads in front of your ideal customers and will only be generating qualified leads. 

It will be much easier to sell to the people who have already expressed interest in what you have to offer than to pitch your products and services to cold leads who might have absolutely no use for them. 

How to Create a Facebook Lead Ad

If Facebook lead ads piqued your interest and you’re looking to leverage them to grow your mailing list, you can create one fairly easily. 

There are a couple of steps you need to take before you can start generating warm leads on Facebook:

Step #1 — Open up the Facebook Ads Manager.

Step #2 — Click on Create in the top left corner and choose Lead Generation as your campaign objective.

Step #3 — Select the Facebook Page you want to run the ad on. 

You can’t run ads from a personal profile. If you don’t have a business page, you’ll first need to create one, then select it from within the Ads Manager. 

Step #4 — Choose the budget, placement, scheduling, and target audience.

Step #5 — Select the format for your lead gen ad.

As with other types of ads, you can choose a photo, video, carousel, or slideshow. 

Step #6 — Create your ad.

Write your headline, the ad copy, and the call-to-action. Upload the visuals to go along with the marketing message, and you’re done. Facebook provides ad preview, so you can see exactly how your ad will appear in the users’ feeds before you launch it. 

Ad Creation & Preview

Image source: Hootsuite

Step #7 — Set up the opt-in form.

Here, you can mess with the following options:

• Form type — you can choose between “more volume” and “higher intent.” The former is simpler and should be used if your goal is to generate as many leads as possible. The latter adds a confirmation step before submitting, as a way of ensuring that the leads are interested in what you’re offering. 

• Intro — You can use this section to explain to prospects why they should fill out the form (i.e., explain what they’re getting in return). This is optional and might not be necessary if the visual clearly conveys what the lead magnet is, such as a 10% discount. 

• Questions — This option gives you the ability to create custom fields if you need more information on your leads aside from their name and email (e.g., job title or gender).

• Privacy Policy — You’ll need to insert a link to your business’ Privacy Policy page before you can launch the ad.

• Thank You Screen — This is the screen the users will see after opting-in. You can write a short “thank you” message, and even insert a download link for the lead magnet or a different CTA if you’d like. 

Using Email Extractors to Find Emails on Facebook

If you aren’t too keen on spending money on Facebook ads, there’s an alternative that will let you get hundreds of email addresses from Facebook in minutes — email finders. 

Every aspect of online marketing can be automated, including finding people’s email on Facebook and other social media websites. There are plenty of tools out there that can scour Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in your stead and extract emails from user profiles.

Apart from automating the entire process, the biggest advantage of email finders is that they allow you to apply filters to your search. Without filters, you’d just be getting emails of random people, most of which will be useless to you as a business owner. 

That said, regardless of how “powerful” the tool is and how advanced its features are, all Facebook email finders are limited to extracting data that’s publicly available on the platform. What this means is that it’s impossible to laser-target people and only extract emails from people you know will be interested in what you have to offer.

At best, what an email finder can do is target specific Facebook groups and extract names, user profiles, email addresses, and other contact information from the groups’ members. This way, you’ll at least know that all the cold leads you generate from Facebook share a common interest, and might just be open to hearing what your business is all about. 

Still, looking for email addresses on Facebook isn’t the best way to grow your mailing list. It beats being a door-to-door salesman, but that’s pretty much it. Even with an email finder that can extract thousands of emails from Facebook, you’d still be sending promotional emails to people who didn’t agree to get spammed, so to speak.

Cold emailing, in general, only works for b2b companies. You can’t realistically expect end-users to be open to receiving promotional messages in their inboxes from businesses they’ve never even heard of. 

Besides, if you’re looking for business email addresses, why would you look on Facebook when there’s a dedicated b2b social network — LinkedIn — where people expect to be contacted by other businesses. 

Let’s do a quick recap of the major drawbacks of all three methods for finding email addresses on Facebook. 

A Better Way to Find Cold Leads

After all is said and done, the only sensible conclusion we can reach is that you should forget Facebook altogether, unless you’re planning on running paid advertisements on the platform. 

We’ve already mentioned that using a software tool to find email addresses on LinkedIn is a much better approach. Apart from that, there are plenty of email extractors you can leverage to find cold email leads much more efficiently than by scraping Facebook. 

At Sell SaaS, we specialize in fully white-label lead gen and email marketing software. You can choose between a dozen different software solutions that will help you both generate a ton of qualified leads in minutes and convert those leads into paying customers with next-to-no effort.

The best part about our software is that you can both use and resell it! Just add your company name, logo, and colors, and you’ll be able to immediately start reselling powerful lead gen and email automation software under your own brand. 

You also get to dictate the price! For every sale you make, you get to keep between 60% and 80%, depending on your partner status. 

Here’s a quick overview of our most popular white-label software. 

If you’re interested in launching a profitable SaaS business or want to scale by creating an additional revenue stream — sign up to become a Sell SaaS partner today and skyrocket your revenue!