If you use Facebook Messenger , there is a very curious feature that most people are unaware of. You can give your contacts nicknames , or nicknames, in conversations you have with them. This can help you to easily identify them among so many similar names that we have stored and also to make fun when you are talking to them. For this reason, we explain to you, step by step and with images, how you can change the nickname of your contacts in Messenger .
Steps to follow to change the nickname in Messenger
Facebook Messenger allows us to send and receive text messages, share images, files, etc. Besides that, it is yet another option for making voice and video calls. But when you have many contacts on Messenger, and that happens very often, it is a bit confusing. Above all, because most of your friends have the habit of calling themselves the same way and you have sent José Martín what it was for José Martínez.
To solve that, and for quite some time, the Messenger application has allowed you to assign a nickname or custom nickname to the contacts you have in it. However, it is a feature that is rarely used or, directly, is unknown.
Do not worry, we explain step by step how to put that nickname.
Step 1. Download Facebook Messenger on your mobile if you don’t have it
Note that this provision is possible only for iOS or Android app, you can not change it in the Messenger you use on the web. So, if you haven’t downloaded it to your mobile yet, do it now in the Play Store or the Apple store.
Step 2: Select the Messenger contact
We start the application and, from the list of contacts that appears on the screen, we look for and select the one we want to change the nickname for . That is, what appears at the top of the chats we have with him.
For that, we can click on the first chat tab at the top, choosing the conversation that we have with the contact and clicking on it to enter. We can also choose the contact tab that has the little person icon and search for it by name among all the ones we have on Facebook.
Step 3: Show profile information
Once we are in the conversation with our contact, if you look closely, on the right side we will see an icon with the information symbol consisting of a white letter i within a blue circle.
We click there.
That takes us to a screen with all the contact details. There, we will see the options to make an audio or video call, view the profile, silence our contact, create groups, etc.
Well, in the main part of the screen we see the option we want and that is called nicknames .
We click on it.
Step 4: Enter the new nickname of our contact
You will see that this takes us to a new screen with our profile and also the photograph of the chosen contact, as well as the words “Define nickname” in both. We can put a nick ourselves too, but in this case, we want to do it with the contact, so we click on it .
That will make a floating box appear that says that our contact will only see this in the conversation. We write the nickname we want to identify that contact in the chats from now on.
We click on “Save”.
Now, if we go to the chat screen with this contact, we will see that the nickname of the contact we have chosen appears at the top, instead of their name. In the same way, in the chat history it also appears that we have changed your nickname .
As you will see, that means that the other person will always see what you do , so do not put nicknames that you do not want the other person not to know.
Finally, keep in mind that this will only change the nickname within the conversation we have with her and nowhere else. For example, if we go to the contacts tab, we can see that it continues to appear with the name that person has put on Facebook.
And what good is it that we can also change our nickname in Messenger ?
Apart from to make the joke or to be called as we wish, you will have already deduced that the other person can also change your nickname . So if you don’t like it, you can tweak it for the conversation and start a huge waste of time playing nicknames all the time.
Can I change the nickname of my contacts in the Facebook Messenger Lite application?
Yes, all this that we are showing you can do both in the normal Facebook Messenger application and in its variant, the Messenger Lite .
In fact, if you have Android and you don’t use Facebook Messenger too much, we recommend this second version (if you have an iPhone, too bad, Facebook loaded Messenger Lite for iOS and it doesn’t look like it’s coming back).
What’s more, the screenshots that we have shown you of the instructions are made in the Android Messenger Lite. What you will see in it is practically the same as the main application, more options simply appear in the profile of our contacts, such as making a secret chat.
This version of the app is made for mobiles with less power or for 2G networks and areas where there is little coverage. It is true that you miss some features, such as encrypted communications with secret chats , but I suppose that, at this point, no one turns to Facebook and its applications when they want to communicate while maintaining privacy.
The truth is that Messenger Lite works much better and faster on any phone. Besides that, it is much lighter (we are talking about more than 200 megabytes in the main application as soon as it is installed, compared to about 25 megabytes in the case of the Lite version). It is also somewhat less invasive with privacy, something that in the case of Facebook always comes in handy.
As you can see, the procedure has no mystery and now you know, step by step, how to change the nickname of your contacts in Messenger conversations.
