Having a local business Page on Facebook is a necessity for many reasons. Greater exposure in your local market, the ability to reach a highly targeted audience and driving more traffic to your website would be just three of them. To give your local business Page even greater authority, Facebook rolled out verified badges at the start of October. Initially the badges are only available for business Pages in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Why verify your local business Facebook Page?
Sometimes a local business can appear to have multiple Facebook Pages so the new verified badge will help people find the right Page. According to a Facebook product marketing manager for Pages
“At scale there will inevitably be duplicates and multiple entries for the same business. So this is one way businesses can make it easier for people to make sure that they are finding and communicating with the right Page.”
After all, there are close to 45 million business Pages on Facebook so there are undoubtedly a few duplicates around! Reports also suggest that Verified Pages will show up higher in search results on Facebook. This could be a really important point as Facebook continues to develop its search facilities.
Getting your Facebook Page verified
Here’s how to get it done …
Click Settings at the top of your Page
From General, click Page Verification
Click Verify this Page, then click Get Started
Enter a publicly listed phone number for your business, your country and language then click Call Me Now to allow Facebook to call you with a verification code
Enter the 4-digit verification code and click Continue
Your local business page on Facebook should now be verified and you’ll see the grey verified badge next to your business name
If, for some reason, the above process doesn’t work or if you’d prefer to verify using an alternative method then Facebook does offer verification with documents instead. Full details on that can be found here.
Facebook has really been focusing on the local SME market lately and this step is another way that local businesses can make themselves stand out from the crowd. If you have a local business page on Facebook then we would strongly recommend you follow the process above and get your page verified.
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