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

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

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.

Let’s get started.

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.

Who can get verified on Facebook

Although in theory, anyone can get verified on Facebook, they have to meet strict verification criteria in order to get approved. Besides following the company’s terms of service, your account should be:

• Authentic: It should represent a real person, entity or business.
• Unique: It should be the unique presence of the person, entity or business it represents. Facebook only verifies one account per business or person, with the exception of language-specific accounts. And note that it doesn’t verify accounts for general interests. For example, it won’t verify a Page dedicated to healthy food but it will verify a page representing a registered publication that’s dedicated to healthy food.
• Complete: It should be active and have all the necessary details such as an “About” section and a profile photo. In addition, it should have at least one post.
• Notable: The person, entity or business it represents should be well-known and get plenty of searches. Facebook is more likely to approve your application if multiple news sources and publications feature the account.

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 and 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.

What happens if Facebook rejects my application

Keep in mind that meeting the basic verification criteria doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get verified. Facebook might still reject your application without specifying a reason. When this happens, you’ll have the option to reapply for verification after 30 days. But make sure you put in additional effort to improve your chances of getting verified this time around.

Here are the possible next steps in case Facebook rejects your application:

• Reach out to Facebook support and try to get more information about why your application was rejected. In case you can get this info, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get verified the next time you apply.
• Create more high-quality content and maintain a regular posting schedule while ramping up your Facebook marketing efforts.
• If you have brand accounts on other social networks, make sure you boost your presence there as well. This will also help you improve your chances of getting verified on those platforms.