How to change Facebook username and pagename for a large company?

[Eric_Lifescript]

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

[john4math]

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.

[EricaMcGillivray]

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!

[EricaMcGillivray]

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.

[Eric_Lifescript]

Thanks John! Great advice. I appreciate your reply!

Kind regards,

• Eric Darby

[Eric_Lifescript]

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

[EricaMcGillivray]

Best of luck!