Let’s talk about verifications on Facebook. And, how you, can get verified on Facebook today! In this guide, we’ll share everything you need to know to get that blue badge next to your personal or business Facebook page. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Step 1 – Understand Who Can Get Verified on Facebook
First things first – Facebook only verifies real people and legally registered businesses. What does this mean? This means that if you have a page for your cat, or if you have an Ed Sheeran fan page – those cannot get verified.
A verified badge ensures the audience that the page they are at is the authentic representation of the public figure, celebrity and/or brand. Imagine this – you look for Ed Sheeran on Facebook and there are 20 different pages of Ed Sheeran and all of them are verified. How would you differentiate between who the real Ed Sheeran is? Well, that is why the blue checkmarks exists. It’s there to tell you, which page is the actual Ed Sheeran.
And this is precisely why fan pages and pages of brands that are not legally registered and trademarked cannot be verified on Facebook.
So, with that out of the way, let’s get to the next step.
Step 2 – Complete Your Profile
Getting verified on Facebook is the best way to establish your personal or business brand. And the one of the first things that you need to do to prepare your profile for verification is to make sure that your profile is complete.
And this means having a proper display photo, a cover photo and a complete ‘about’ section. In short, you have to fill out your profile with all the details that you can. If you’re a business, add your website link, input your working ours, add your telephone number and so on. If you are an individual, add in details about you in your ‘about’ section. Add link to your personal website.
Can you imagine a Facebook employee ever verifying an account that is empty? Of course not! Remember, the reviewers who approve or reject verification applications are human. You’d want to make your profile presentable. Have a bunch of posts, get some engagement going on, have a profile that is completely filled out with all the details and of course, a professional display and cover photo!
Step 3 – Check and Build Your Notability
One of the main factors that decide whether a profile will get verified or not is ‘notability’. In short, what this means is if you are a person or business of ‘high interest’. In other words, if are someone that is searched for in significant volumes. Are you someone that has an established web presence? Are you well-known within your country?
The simplest way to understand the requirement for notability is understanding web presence. In short, Facebook will do a Google search on you. And they will look for news and media coverage featuring you/your brand. If they find that there are notable and reliable news websites that cover you – you become eligible.
In fact, when you fill out the Facebook verification form, they ask for such 5 links where you have been featured, that are not paid or promotional. And this is all that matters. If you can get 5-10 full features about you in notable and reliable news sites, you will get verified on Facebook without any hassles.
The key here is to ensure that the sites you get covered on are not promotional or paid. You cannot simply buy a guest post on a random blog and expect it to help you with verification. No. You need to have features in publications where people cannot buy their way into a feature.
Step 5 – Be Unique
The account you want verified must be unique. And this means, that you cannot verify multiple accounts under one identity. Let’s say you are a singer, and you have a personal profile on Facebook, and you additionally also have your musician page on Facebook. Apart from this, you also have an additional fans page where your fans have formed a community to discuss topics related to your music.
Now, if you quality for verification, you can verify one page and one page alone. You cannot have, say three different pages verified based off of one identity.
Similarly, if you are a business page, and you have your main brand Facebook page. Additionally, you also have another page for customer care. You can only verify one page under one legal identity. Of course, the exception to this would be businesses that have divisions and branches that are incorporated as separate legal identity. In this case, you can have multiple pages of the same global business verified. Example of this would be a global company with branches across the world in 20 different countries, where they are incorporated as a legal entity in each of the country, they are in. In this case, the same brand can have 20 different verified pages.
Step 6 – Make the Application
And we are now at the final step. This is where you navigate to the Facebook form where you make a submission for your verification. It’s a simple form where you input a variety of details, attach some documents and input links that feature you and you submit the application.
Once you’ve made the submission you would get an answer from Facebook within 3-5 business days. And that’s about it.
But – what happens if you get rejected via the app submission despite having plenty of media coverage? Well, that is when you have reach out to a boutique social media agency who can then prepare an internal application for verification on your behalf and send it to their media partnership relation at Facebook. In this case, the application gets a human review and significantly improves the chances of verification.
So, if you are struggling to get verified on Facebook and not getting anywhere via in-app self-submission, you could always look into getting a media agency to submit on your behalf.