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 Instant Articles Not Working
I'm getting the following error on Instant Articles despite my site having substantial traffic and hundreds of articles. The provided URL is not being accepted because the site has minimal readership, which violates the Instant Article Policies (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/policy/). Please provide a different URL. Here's the blog: http://bit.ly/2Mh1Aes
Social Media | | Neumarkets.com1 -
Linkedin "company website" link - any value?
Hi So, on Linkedin, I can put my company website. I've been trying to figure out if this is a nofollow, or do follow - or, not even really a link. Here's how it appears in my profile's source code Websites <a target="_blank" <strong="">href="/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmaxvape%2Ecom&urlhash=MtlQ&trk=ppro_website">Company Website</a> Is this even a "link"? I'm guessing the way it is built, no it's not even a nofollow link. Secondly, does anyone know any good link-juice you can get form Linkedin. Thanks!
Social Media | | Ted_Cullen0 -
Facebook Apps
Just discovered this site http://northsocial.com/examples/ They charge a few dollars a day to use their Facebook apps. However, I am thinking it will be pretty simple to develop apps like these ourselves. Also, once the app is created we can use it for all of our social media accounts. Wanted to get some opinions on the matter. My questions are: 1. Do apps help generate more likes? 2. Can Apps be promoted? 3. Is it challenging to create a Facebook app? 4. Are Facebook apps worth investment of time?
Social Media | | Bryan_Loconto1 -
Number of Facebook likes and shares for a webpage went significantly down.
I noticed that a bunch of "likes" and "shares" had gone down for a webpage I do marketing for, and I wanted to see if anyone had also experienced this. About two years ago, I realized that when I would send a FB message with a link to a webpage I was promoting, the number of shares and likes for the page would go up by one. So, thinking that I had stumbled onto something incredible, I proceeded to message over 500 people on facebook with a link to the webpage. Soon enough, I had increased the likes and shares displayed on the webpage to 635 (as shown in the Digg Digg plugin). Today, I went back to the same page and realized the number of shares and likes had gone down to 160. Has anyone experienced a drop in the number of shares and likes, and has anyone increased their likes and shares by sending a message with a link to a webpage being marketed? (You can test this out by messaging someone in facebook with a single link to webpage that displays the number of facebook "likes" and "shares" -Once you send the message the number should go up by one) Thanks
Social Media | | 1activator0 -
SEO optimization of Facebook page
Hi, I have started to build a great community with the facebook page of my web site. I might be wrong but I believe that a good optimization of my facebook page could have an effect on the SEO of my web sites. If I am wrong (I am still a newbie), please let me know! So if I am wright, can you tell me what are the important configurations to setup in the facebook page in order to get the most out of that Facebook page? Thanks ! Nancy
Social Media | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Facebook Places & Business Pages - Any way to consolidate
Hello, I've read multiple posts on this, and the new timeline layout rolling out for business pages..but I haven't seen an update to this issue. My company has a retail store and an online store. Because of this, we had to create a places page and a regular business page. When people "check-in" via Facebook, the check-in goes to the places page. But our main marketing efforts and large fan base are at the business page. Facebook used to allow you to combine these. In a perfect world, all would live on one business page. Has anyone heard an update on this feature? Thanks either way.
Social Media | | Blenny0 -
IFrame facebook fanbox and tweet blocks
I am looking for a Facebook fanbox display, and a recent tweets display which looks nice and uses an iframe. The reason I desire an iframe is to eliminate these otherwise followed links which I do not necessarily endorse. When you use a facebook fanbox, if 12 users are displayed then you have an extra 12 links added to your page. When you use a recent tweet display then each tweet, depending on your configuration, can offer many links. The tweeter's avatar is a link along with the sender's name and any links added to the message.
Social Media | | RyanKent0 -
What's up with the #! in twitter & Facebook URL's?
I was just wondering why Facebook and now Twitter have added "#!" into the url structure? Does this mean we should link to a twitter profile like this - twitter.com/profile - anymore? Should we now be linking like this: twitter.com/#!/kevinbarnes Kevin
Social Media | | KevinBarnes0