How to Authenticate Your Facebook Page

I know for ME, this post has been a long time coming! I have emailed everyone I could find at Facebook…no response. Searched the web high and low for answers…no luck. I just continued to persevere in my research and FINALLY found some answers that I think will help many of you.

As you may know, if you want to combine two Facebook pages, it can be a tricky process. (see this post for more information about merging pages) If you don’t have the “merge duplicate pages” option in your page settings, then you need to pursue a different method for merging your pages. Sometimes even then, though, you get stuck by Facebook saying that you cannot merge your pages because one or more of them has not been “authenticated.”

So how do you “authenticate” your page? and Why?

For some reason, on some pages (and please, oh silent Facebook, if you want to enlighten me, please do), Facebook needs to make sure you’re the real deal before they will let you take certain actions (like merging your page with another duplicate page). This may be the case if you have a LOT of fans, or if you DON’T have a lot of fans (I know, no rhyme or reason!), or the pages you’re trying to merge have different names.

The good news is, it’s really easy to authenticate your page if  you are, in fact, an official representative of your page!

Step 1

Under your profile picture on your page, and under your statistics (likes, talking about, etc.) you should see a link that says “Protect Your Page.” Click on that and you’ll see this box. (If you don’t see “protect your page” then you’re back to square one, unfortunately.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 2

Once you click on the “Protect Your Page” link, you’ll be asked to certify that you’re an official representative of your organization or company. Check the box and click “Proceed with Verification.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3

Okay, this is the part where you need to put in a lot of information about your organization or business. Most of it you should know by heart anyway (address, website, etc.)

Where it says “Third Party Listing,” this just means they are looking for some external, 3rd party site that lists your organization in some way. Sort of an independent verifier. So if you’re an animal welfare organization, for example, you might put your Petfinder site URL, or your directory listing on Pet Harbor. You could also list the URL of your company’s page on your local Chamber of Commerce website, or a review site at a place like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Yahoo Local or Urban Spoon. Basically, they need to see a website listing information about your company (even just name and address will do) that is NOT created by you, that proves that you exist in some way and verifies your location.

There is one other step here. You are required to list an official email address for the company so that you can receive a confirmation email. But it ALSO has to be an email address attached to YOUR personal Facebook account.

So let’s go over what that means.

When you set up your Facebook account, you have to have an email address. For me, it’s my personal email address. For most of us, we just have that one email address on our accounts. But you CAN add a lot more email addresses if you want. They encourage you to do that because (well, probably so they can send you emails) they want to have a backup email in case your main email becomes inaccessible.

So the email address you provide here, in this authentication process, MUST be associated with your own Facebook account.

So say you’re the volunteer with your organization who does Facebook, but your official email address for the organization is info@yourshelter.org. Well, you probably don’t have access to that account because it goes to a staff member, right? In that case, you will NOT be able to verify your account. Unless that “official” email is associated with your personal Facebook account, Facebook does not consider you an “official” representative of your organization or company.

So in that case, you’ll have to do one of two things.

You’ll have to get access to that account, at least temporarily, to add it to your personal Facebook account. If your organization won’t go for that, then you’ll have to have someone else do the authentication–and that person will have to add that email address to THEIR account!

I know. Crazy and labor-intensive.

But for MOST people, you ARE going to have access to that email address, because you ARE the official representative of your company or organization, so hopefully it won’t be such a hassle.

If you try to put in an email address that is not associated with your Facebook account, it will give you an error message and will not let you proceed.

(Here’s how to add an email address to your Facebook account)

Step 4

 

 

 

 

 

That’s really all there is to it! You get a confirmation message asking you to wait up to one week for a response. When I did this on my pages, one took 2 days and one took 4 days. So that seems about right.

Once your page is “Authentic,” then you can go about the business of merging other pages into it!

Good luck. Please let me know if this worked for you or if you’re still hitting road blocks; I will do all I can to figure it out for us all!

Still need help? Make an appointment with me for live, one-on-one troubleshooting!

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I'm available via most social media, so drop me a line! I'll answer your questions and I really look forward to hearing from you and helping if I can!

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