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
-
Is a Facebook lookalike audience a good idea when audience requires a necessary characteristic
We are running a social media campaign for a point of sales system for restaurants and retail stores. We have had quite a bit of traffic to our website from Adwords and SEO. We have thought of the idea of creating a new look-alike audience based off the people who have come to our website already. However, we only really want to only build a Facebook audience consisting of business owners, managers or decision makers of restaurants and retail stores that would be interested in a point of sales system at some point. We know that most of the people who have come to our website (from SEO and Adwords) have been interested, in some degree, in our point of sales system. My reservation though is that if we create a look-alike audience, Facebook will not be able to replicate the type of audience that really fits this profile - that it will create an audience possibly of similar personalties, interests etc to that of those that have visited our site, but not one that consists predominately or entirely of owners, managers or decision makers of restaurants and retail stores. This is the necessary characteristic we are wanting for our audience members. Is it fair to assume that in this situation Facebook won't be effective in its creation of a look-alike audience to fulfil what we are really needing as stated? Or am I underestimating Facebook's abilities? You thoughts here would be greatly appreciated.
Social Media | | Gavo0 -
The Rules Of A Facebook Group
Hi there, I'm currently looking to set up a Facebook Group for an Education Recruitment Business I am working with. We're setting up the Facebook group to foster a sense of community and collaboration with our current teachers. I'm currently in the process of drawing up a list of rules and regulations for our first group. The obvious ones are there such as no profanity, no spamming (can't stand spam - especially those fake Ray Ban ads!) but there I would really love some other group rule suggestions especially when it comes to users promoting our competition as education recruitment is a very competitive sector. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, James Miller - Digital Marketing Executive
Social Media | | James-Miller0 -
No employees so will a search engine optimisation company work me?
I'm self-employed and run two different companies solely by myself there is no employees but I contacted the two UK SEO companies which are recommended on Moz both of them based in London, but after sending them emails and speaking to them on the phone neither contacted me about they must think I'm too small. Do you find that small one-man band companies find it hard to get a SEO to work for them because my budget will be too small? The company I would like to improve the rankings on is a Whitby Holidat Cottages letting agency in Whitby www.EndeavourCottge.co.uk with 10 properties, so obviously I can't afford a large budget but I could happily afford a monthly subscription if they could do necessary works for me do you think this sounds feasible? Or am I better just continuing and trying to make the time to do the work myself even I'm not that expertise. What is your thoughts and experience? Thank you Alan Davidson
Social Media | | alandavidson1 -
Facebook - one page or two for local insurance agency with 2 locations?
We have 2 offices within 20 miles of each other, and we are getting ready to launch a facebook page (or pages)... I'm not sure whether we should put up one page or two. One office is our 'corporate office', and the other a 'satellite' office, both are very much open for business, but there will never be a need to post something on one and not the other...the two locations are just too close for there to be a need for that. If something is relevant to one town, it is relevant to the other. I am really leaning toward one page for both offices for many reasons, but it seems like facebook wants me to have 2 pages (ie. I can't put in more than one address). Any help is much appreciated! Thank you!
Social Media | | jgower0 -
Facebook Shares and the rel="canonical" tag
We use canonical tags for multipart videos, using part 1 of the series as their canonical tag. The logic behind this is that if you have eight parts, it's better for part 1 to get all the link juice for the entire series, so that when someone searches for the main keyword, part 1 is the highest ranked part to appear in search results, and the link juice from every part is aggregated into that one page. The problem is the Facebook made changes to their URL sharing practices to reflect the canonical tag. So as long as the tag is used Facebook ignores the image and description from say part 2, and uses the description from part 1. Can this be waived by using Facebook Open Graph Protocol? Thanks!!
Social Media | | Tug-Agency0 -
SEO & Social | More SEO effect by liking the page URL rather than the Facebook Page?
SEOMoz Gurus, I am wondering what our best implementation strategy shoul dbe around linking up the Facebook Like button on our pages. Essentially there are two options: A) Linking the button directly to the Facebook Page of the web site so every Like is actually converting into a Facebook "Fan" which can be messaged going forward through our Facebook page. B) Having them like the actual URL which might be more beneficial from an SEO and viral perspective as now a link to the actual URL gets shared on the Liker's facebook wall and it should also be easier to use that lIke for Google & Co. as it's tied to the actual URL not a random Facebook page given that search engines already convert those signals. Both approaches obviously have their benefits. Are there any common guidelines on what is a better approach to take from a pure SEO perspective? Thanks /Thomas
Social Media | | tomypro0 -
Crawlable Facebook Comments
A lot of blogs are beginning to use facebook comments. I came across a WordPress plugin called "Crawlable Facebook Comments". The plugin makes a text version of your iframe comments visible to googlebot. You can see how it works at: http://www.zewlak.com/crawlable-facebook-comments/ Is there really any utility to this seo-wise? Comment content is normally not optimized and you will end up linking to a bunch of facebook profiles. What do you folks think?
Social Media | | Muhammad.IST0