How to get verified on Facebook: Your step-by-step guide

As a brand or business, building credibility with your online audience should be part of your overall social media marketing strategy. Learning how to get verified on Facebook (and other platforms) is one great way to do this.

Why? Well, getting verified on Facebook is a must for public figures, brands and companies that are well-known and susceptible to being replicated or parodied.

In this post, you’ll discover some essential steps on how to get verified on Facebook, as well as a few additional details to give you a thorough understanding of how Facebook verification works.

What is Facebook verification?

Facebook verification provides credibility to official pages and puts a clear distinction between the real Pages and the Pages run by fans or imposters.

Before we get into the Facebook verification process, you’ll want to know what it means to get verified on Facebook in the first place and why it’s so important.

As we briefly touched on earlier, businesses and public figures may often see people creating Pages and profiles similar to theirs—whether it’s to imitate them or to build a fan community. Even if there’s no malicious intent behind those Pages and profiles, there’s still a huge risk of other Facebook users mistaking them for the real thing.

In addition, Facebook prioritizes verified profiles and Pages in its search results. So Facebook verification ensures that your Page prominently shows up at the top of relevant searches, which could further improve your reach. See how the official verified Page for Workday gets top priority when you search for the company name on Facebook.

>> View more: Facebook automation: The ultimate guide for your brand

8 steps for how to get verified on Facebook

While most of the process for getting verified is simple, some parts are more complicated than others.

However, if you follow these eight steps to a tee and have everything you need, you should be able to get that blue checkmark with little additional effort.

Step 1: Open the verification request form

Start the verification process by heading to Facebook’s verification request form. This is where you’ll complete all of the following steps.

Step 2: Choose your verification type

You have the option to verify your personal profile if you are a public figure. Or, as long as you’re logged into your Facebook account, you can select from a dropdown menu which business page you’d like to verify. Each business page you manage will appear, making it easy to go through this process for each of your businesses or clients.

Step 3: Confirm authenticity

The next step is proving that your Facebook page is authentic. Remember, verification proves to your audience that it’s authentic. So it’s important that Facebook looks for credible documentation in order to approve verification.

The documentation options that you can upload a copy of include:

Driver’s license

Passport

National identification card

Tax filing

Recent utility bill

Articles of incorporation

You’ll click the Choose Files button in order to upload your documents.

Step 4: Confirm notability

This next step is called “confirming notability,” but essentially, you’re selecting a category for your business page or profile. This is especially important when verifying profiles—Facebook wants to ensure that your profile or page is something that people are actually interested in or searching for before awarding verification.

Categories to choose from include:

News/Media

Sports

Government & Politics

Music

Fashion

Entertainment

Digital Creator/Blogger/Influencer

Gamer

Business/Brand/Organization

Other

Step 5: Add your country

The next step is to add the country where you or your business is most well-known. Even if you have a global company, you’ll want to choose the country or region where you have the largest audience. If you’re unsure, you can easily discover this by looking at your website’s Google Analytics or at your Facebook insights.

Step 6: Add your audience also known as

This step is completely optional, however, the more information you provide, the easier it is for Facebook’s team to confirm your verification. We recommend inputting basic information about your audience demographics. However, if you have no other “AKA” names for your business, you can of course leave that section blank.

Step 7: Add 5 articles that show your page or profile is in the public interest

This step is also optional, but take our word for it: do not skip this step. This is one of the best ways to help prove your case. By including popular social media accounts, articles that talk about your business, Wikipedia profiles or anything else that proves people are interested in, following or talking about your brand, you’re making a much more compelling argument that your page should be verified.

Step 8: Submit the form

Voila! You’ve submitted your application for Facebook verification. The only thing left to do now is wait.

>> View more: The ultimate guide to using Facebook stories for business

Final Conclusion

Now that you know how to get verified on Facebook, it’s time to start gathering all of the information you need so you can submit your form. From there, your biggest job is making sure you’ve got a stellar Facebook marketing strategy to increase reach and engagement, get your audience interested in your business and generate sales.