How to change Facebook username and pagename for a large company?
-
Greetings,
I've been tasked with investigating how to change our Facebook pagename and username. Problem is we have a huge number of followers - over 1,000,000.
From my research it appears you have to submit a change request to FB and hope they accept it as you can only make these changes once. In addition, the change appears to be more challenging if you have more than 200 likes. And there is no guarantee that FB will accommodate your change request. I have been unable to contact a human being at FB.
SEOMoz Staff - May I ask how you effectively changed your page name and username? What was your process?
Kind regards,
Eric Darby
-
Best of luck!
-
Thanks Erica! This is just what I needed. This is a huge undertaking for us. I appreciate the granularity of your answer!
Kind regards,
Eric Darby
-
Thanks John! Great advice. I appreciate your reply!
Kind regards,
- Eric Darby
-
Oh, I should add that they requested quite a bit of information about our rebranding. We ended up sending them: our new URL and it's whois, our trademark number on our new name, an internal slide deck about the rebranding, and a pretty long statement about what we were doing. We're pretty lucky here at Moz that our name change wasn't a huge state secret, but we were pretty surprised about how much documentation they wanted.
-
Hi Eric,
We definitely worked directly with Facebook to do these changes. They flipped both the name change and the vanity URL change on their end and did the 301 redirect from our old page.
If you go into your "admin" section on your FB page and into the "basic information" by the "name" field, you'll see a link to "request change."
Facebook's pretty invested in getting businesses on there, so they seemed to be very responsive about this.
Hope that helps!
-
If the new name is more than 5 characters, I think you can just go to https://www.facebook.com/username and submit the request.
if that doesn't work or it's less than 5 characters, I recently had success through the following channel, and believe me I've tried everything to get an email for a real person or a real person on the phone. When you log into your Facebook account, there should be an "Email support" link in the left nav. I picked "Other" and send in information for the request, and someone actually contacted me and they processed our request! Note that we have ~35K likes, and do spend a bit on advertising ($1-5$K/mo).
I would suspect they'd redirect the old URL to the new URL so it shouldn't be a problem to change it, but you'll want to confirm that with Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/seomoz goes to their new moz page URL, so that's one case confirming my suspicions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I verify a Facebook Page with 28k+ likes on it?
Hi there, I want to get the Facebook page of a fashion blogger verified. This blogger has around 28,510 likes on her facebook book at the moment, can this Facebook page be verified? The blogger has been trying to get the FB page verification done for a long time without any luck. Now the blogger wants me to verify her Facebook page. How do I go about the process? It will be great if you can share a step by step process. And how long will it take to get the page verified? Also, I need to get this done soon, so a quick response will be appreciated. If you want any other info please let me know. Regards
Social Media | | DebashishB
Deb0 -
Facebook Page - About/Description/General About/Mission - Questions
Hi, Im just setting up a FB fan page for a client How terrible is it to use clients websites home page descriptive copy as the Facebook page long description ? Language is in Turkish which i don't speak so i'm not able to edit a new version of it just for FB and no budget to hire Turkish speaker to come up with something. So was going to copy & paste but that would be duplicate with HP obviously. How important is it to fill in 'Mission Statement' & 'General About' ? Especially if long description likely to already include that info ? I think long descrip is important for FB pages on seo etc etc but a good one eliminates importance of 'Mission' & 'General About', or is it still advisable to fill these in or are they just extra boxes for flexibility ? I take it when it comes to securing a vanity url (once we hit 25+ fans) for a foreign language version FB page it should ideally be brand name (which includes a keyword) in the local/target language ? The page name is already the brand name in English but since contains keyword is it best to rename into local target language similarly to the url for consistency and local targeting or better to keep one in Turkish and one in English ? Many Thanks Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Trying to find a WP application (that does not require a FB application) that synchronizes website blog posts with a company facebook page
I'm not a developer and it's been about 5 years since I helped a client synchronize their wordpress blog posts with their FB page. I remember it being much simpler to do this in the past. However recently I'm noticing that all of the WP auto post applications require a Facebook application to get the synchronization to function properly.
Social Media | | RosemaryB
Is there any WP plugin available that does not require this? Something that just requires FB keys?0 -
Can Google index content from within Facebook apps? (photos, events, custom app, etc.)
Hi guys, I've Googled the heck out of this query and I seem to run into very top level answers (and I do apologize if my ignorance is to blame), but is Google able to index content from within Facebook applications such as Photos, Events, and possibly a custom app? If Google is able to better index both Javascript and AJAX, I would assume that the simple answer would be "yes", but since many of these applications don't provide outbound links, tracking traffic and conducting follow up experiments appears to be quite difficult. Since many of us use Facebook as a destination, if we take the time to optimize deeper content by adding detailed captions in pictures or unique descriptions for events, how can we determine that 1. the content is being crawled by search engines and 2. how is that content crawled and disseminated for user consumption on search engines? I appreciate your time and thank you for your insights.
Social Media | | millennium-marketing
-Vero T.0 -
ShopTab Facebook App - Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello I've been trialling an app for Facebook called Shoptab where you can add a shopfront to your Facebook page and then users can browse through the items and when they click buy or more info they are linked through to the main site. The app displays the product, title, description etc so I was wondering if we would run the risk of duplicate content issues by loading our inventory to this app? OR would Google see the hyperlink through to the original item and no damage done? It would be very easy to add our whole inventory to this app. Thanks
Social Media | | simplesimonseo0 -
What are the issues with changing my domain?
I have a self-hosted wordpress blog that I have been authoring for 5 years. It resides at www.ready2spark.com. I have built a static wordpress website (fyi - it's a different wp theme from the blog) to promote my company, named READY2SPARK. The site location is temporarily http://www.ready2spark.com/staticwebsite. Since this will be my main company website, it makes the most sense to have the static site reside at www.ready2spark.com and the blog reside at www.ready2spark.com/blog (or, at least, I think). I'm hoping some of you experts can let me know what the issues with changing my domain would be or provide suggestions on what the optimal architecture should be.
Social Media | | LaraMcCulloch0 -
Custom facebook page
Hi guys I have been building custom facebook pages using fbml but now i see talk of using iframes....can you guys please tell me what is best practice at the moment to build custom facebook pages and if there is a tut you can direct me to......i would prefer the iframe method but want to be clear on the process. thanks for your time cheers
Social Media | | nomad-2023230 -
Dud facebook likes / fake profiles.
I've seen a few companies pop up offering 'facebook likes' for sale. I'm assuming these are all dud accounts that are subject to get deleted in a second if facebook catches on. Anyone else have something to add?
Social Media | | qlkasdjfw0