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
-
Facebook Share Percentage - On Blog Posts
Hi everyone, I'm trying to find a way to give each post we are creating a quality status. Since bounce rate on this case isn't really a viable option (Blog Behavior) since people could stay 10 mins reading it and then go elsewhere without interacting. I'm looking for a way to focus on facebook sharing, lets say something simple like "Facebook Shares / Sessions" per each blog post, while I can have an idea on my own data, lets say my highest is 4.1% of all people that go to that post end it up sharing it. But I wonder on average what would you consider a good engagement post, what would that percentage might be? Thanks in advance.
Social Media | | JoaoCJ0 -
Facebook Outreach Tips - what to say
Hi, I've been shown how to do facebook outreach in my home town. I am a weight loss hypnotist. I was shown how to do outreach to possible home town clients using the facebook search feature. I go to the search and type in "Friends who like weight loss" And I get a couple of friends who have liked a major weight loss site After I've done that search, I look to the right in facebook. It has a bunch of dropdowns. I choose the same search parameters except I change it to "Live in Boise" (my town) and "Not my Friend". I get dozens of facebook users who live in Boise and are not my friends and are interested in weight loss. I can message these people (less than 30 a day) Here's the problem: I don't want to spam them. How do I get these people interested in my weight loss hypnosis program (I could really help them) by sparking up a conversation and not spamming. Everything I can think of saying seems manipulative. I don't know how to start a conversation and invite people to come in for a free sample session. My free sample session is 30 minutes and is free just to see if the client and I are a good fit. My website is bobweikel.com if that helps. How do I do this with the utmost integrity? Thank you.
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Facebook Contest: Fan or Not?
Let's say that I manage a Page for a company, and I run a contest through a "Promoted Post". Does every single Like to that "Promoted post" will be counted as new fan? My objective is to increase the fans number of the page, which is your best practice to achieve that through a Facebook contest? Many thanks.
Social Media | | YESdesign0 -
Facebook Account Architectures (Pages, Groups, etc)
I'm looking for help with how to setup/manage a community on Facebook. Here is the scenario: You have a bike store owner. Out of the store he also organizes different biking training groups, for people who want to be able to meet certain personal goals. These groups like to interact with the other members inside their groups, but not across groups. Does the following architecture make sense? The business would have 1 Company Page. Then for for various different training groups, the company admin would create Facebook 'Groups' which allow for interaction amongst members that way. Does that make sense? Or is there a smarter way to do this? It seems like this isn't very unified, because there could be a bunch of different groups. Is there a way to set this up inside the business' page itself? Any other thoughts?
Social Media | | brianspatterson0 -
Anyway to analyse Facebook Success?
Great news, yesterday we had a nice big spike of referrals from facebook, GA shows them all going to a certain article (an online magazine type site), but only shows them as coming from /l.php (Report: Traffic sources->referrals->facebook.com - secondary dimension landing page) Nobody in the office did anything with facebook and that article, so it must be a visitor; any ideas how we can find out any more details about who or why? It would be great to be able to reproduce as in the 4th April saw more FB traffic to us than March!
Social Media | | Fammy0 -
Tool to easily see the number of Facebook likes/G+ of a URL?
Does anyone know of a tool I can use to easaly see how many likes/tweets/+1 a URL has? Thanks.
Social Media | | scotennis0 -
Facebook like box error
Hello, Using the following code to display a facebook like box http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-NLP-Coaching-Institute-of-California/187804434598142" data-width="198" data-height="320" data-show-faces="true" data-stream="false" data-header="true"> Getting "log in to see this content" when we're not logged in. Our Age setting is set to 13+ example image attached Thanksfacebook-error.gif
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Do facebook shares pass share juice the same way links pass link juice?
If i have a page on my domain say PAGE-A and let's say it's located at: http://www.mydomain.com/something/page-a and this page has quite a lot of page authority from many many inbound links. It is my understanding that if i "sculpt" the internal links on PAGE-A to point at only my primary targets, let's call the PAGE-B, PAGE-C, and PAGE-D; then those pages would gain some benefit from this link juice flowing through. Consider a similar situation where i have a page, say PAGE-F located at: http://www.mydomain.com/anotherpage/page-F and page-F gets 150 facebook shares. would the links on page-F pass this benefit on in any way? Or is only the direct target of the facebook share gaining benefit from this facebook sharing? Furthermore, lets consider a scenario where there are 30 or 40 similar pages like PAGE-F all with links out to my primary targets. Would these primary targets gain anything as these 30 or 40 pages gained facebook shares? Repeat above question, replace 'facebook' with 'twitter'. repeat again for 'google+' ?
Social Media | | adriandg0