How will Facebook Verified affect your brand?

Facebook recently announced the launch of Verified Pages and Profiles.

Following in the steps of Twitter & Google+, verified accounts are now denoted by a little blue tick icon on the page and in Facebook’s search results.

What’s good about this?

If you come home to find a friend request from Justin Beiber, you’ll know whether to let out a ecstatic squeal of delight or ‘ignore’ yet another wannabe, crazed fan or fraudster.

But on a serious note, the little blue tick will make it a lot easier for users to find official fan pages and accounts for brands, celebrities and public figures.

It’ll also help curb imposters from pretending to be you or your brand, and help users spot and engage with the real you!

What’s bad about this?

You can’t verify your page… yet.

At the moment, users and page owners can’t request to have their accounts verified. Instead, Facebook is proactively verifying the pages and profiles with the largest audiences, and by the looks of things this is just being rolled out to accounts with over two million ‘likes’.

So, brands and pages with a large number of subscribers are still exposed to parody accounts, which means potential fans could be going elsewhere.

What do we advise?

It is unknown whether Facebook plan to make this optional for smaller pages and profiles. However, you can still help prevent rogue or parody accounts of your brand.

By simply searching for your brand (and variations of the name) you’ll be able to spot other pages who claim to be you. You can inform Facebook that you’re the ‘owner of the business’, claim the page and merge it with your main page. This will have the effect of allowing your page to claim all of your imposter’s fans, as well as closing the fake page.