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.
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 won't show up in SERP
Hello! One of my clients' Facebook page isn't showing up on the SERP, even when you search "CLIENT NAME facebook" or an excerpt from a live post. Our social media team looked over all the settings in Meta, and everything looks correct, so we are stumped. Anyone encounter this before?
Social Media | | GoogleAlgoServant0 -
CPA for Facebook Advertising
I'm just wanting to find out more if I can set a CPA strategy for Facebook advertising and re-targeting. An acquisition for us would be when someone reaches our thank you page. This indicates a successful conversion on our site. Are we able to set a Facebook strategy where payment is only made for advertising upon reaching that page (and achieving that conversion)?
Social Media | | Gavo1 -
Facebook Likes, What are your thoughts on people begging for them?
Hi There, I'm seeing more and more businesses (especially small businesses) setting up Facebook pages and then almost begging people to like them with lines such as "lets see if we can get to 200 likes", etc etc. What are your thoughts on this does it really help and do you think Google will find a way to not count them as spammy?
Social Media | | Ant710 -
How to define image to display on a facebook link?
Currently I am in the process of relaunching http://www.grassrootsseo.co.uk - however a friend pointed out to me that no image displays when I'm on facebook and link to my site. Anyone know how to define which image you want Facebook to show when you link to a certain page? Many thanks...
Social Media | | GrassRootsSEO0 -
How do I track my Facebook page rank?
Hey guys, Probably a newbie question, but I'm wondering if there's a way to track Facebook (or other offsite profiles that I own) pagerank along with my domain? I'm working on a project right now where I noticed we're not on the front page for our search term, but our Facebook page is. It would just be helpful to have that info for a more complete SEO picture. Thanks!
Social Media | | somacore
Mike0 -
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 -
Possible to get information about Facebook Likes, Google+ and Tweets via API
As subject reads - I wonder if it possible to get the information about Facebook Likes, Google+´s and Tweets by using your API? It would help a lot.
Social Media | | SEOmannen0 -
Widgets like Facebook Like and AddThis - Any Negative SEO?
I could go widget crazy with my website, there are so many cool buttons and linking this and likes and etc. There's one that is used a lot, called "Addthis" that adds a series of small icons to share a page via facebook, twitter, etc. The javascript looks innocent enough, but there's a link, and who knows what google makes of it. Then there are the dozen or so Facebook widgets - are they safe to use without negative SEO consequences? Does anyone know of any other pitfalls with using the numerous addons offered free to enhance your site? Thanks for any wisdom out there! Jean
Social Media | | JeanYates0