How To Change Your Facebook Business Page (In Three Easy Steps)

We recently rebranded our business and found that making changes online were by far the biggest challenge. It’s amazing how much online content you have with your web address and brand on, isn’t it?!

One area we needed to rebrand and rename was our Facebook Page.

This wasn’t as simple as it could be… it was a royal pain in the arse, in fact!

Facebook make it purposefully difficult to change the Page name. Its aim is to stop spammy Pages getting loads of likes and then changing their identity to be sold on as another type of Page (an early trend for the click bait-type Pages).

This means that for honest folk like us, it’s not a simple process.

Here’s how you can change your Facebook Page name without sending in utility bills or searching for hours on the Facebook forum.

 

1) Rebrand Your Page first – Show Facebook You’re Serious

Lets start with the rebranding bits first. If you’re changing your Page name then you need to demonstrate to Facebook that you’re serious. Rebranding your Page and changing all the copy is easy, but doing it first is essential.

Here’s a quick tick sheet and ‘how to’: 

Change your header image and profile picture.

The image sizes for Facebook are 180 x 180 pixels for the avatar and 851 x 315 pixels for the banner image. It gets a bit technical with mobile so here’s a great post from Jon Loomer about the technical sizing and areas to focus on. Get a graphic designer to help you or send us an email and we’ll organise it.

• Log in as your Page on Facebook

• Click on your profile name at the top so that you’re on your profile’s page

• Click on the camera icon on the banner and upload a new one

• Do the same for the avatar and change that too.

 

 

Change your website links and email

If you’re changing your domain on your website then change your website URL on Facebook too and any mentions of your old brand. Also make sure that you change your email in your ‘About’ section which will have your old domain on.

 

 

2) Change Your About Section Copy

Then change your About section and your Page name and URL (this was the messy bit).

Click on ‘About’ to get to the right section of your Page.

Click ‘Change Facebook Web Address’ and change it to your new name (so we became facebook.com/spaghettiagency). You can only do this a few times in the lifetime of the Page so please get it right – and proofread it!

This changes straight way so you’ll need to update all links to your Facebook page from your website, email and other online sites like Eventbrite, Mailchimp, blogs etc…

 

 

Then change your ‘About’ copy.

We left our ‘Short Description’ the same. The content for the Page would still be the same and to be honest it’s best to do this even if you’re going to radically change your output as Facebook is cautious of change. So maybe tell a little white lie here if you’re planning on changing what you post on Facebook after the name change.

Change your ‘Long description’ into a kind of press release of the re-brand. This is not for a press release or even for your audience… this is for Facebook.

Change it to something like: “We’re rebranding to XXX and changing this Page to XXX. We’ll still be giving you XXX and XXX just under the new brand of XXX”.

This demonstrates to Facebook (when you submit the changes) that you really are changing your brand and what you’re changing it to. You can’t tell them in any other way so this is very important. A Facebook moderator will read this so it’s like an email to them.

 

 

3) Change The Page Name

Hover over ‘Name’ and then click edit. Now you can change your Page name… or at least request Facebook to do it.

 

 

Follow the instructions. Save it.

Then wait three weeks… 

… Seriously…

… Facebook won’t change it right away as they have to make sure it’s a change that’s not too different and they will read that About section press release (which is why you need to do it).

They approved ours and then told us that they would leave it for two weeks to make sure that anyone who liked the page was ‘OK’ with it. I’m not sure how they checked (if at all) but it was left with that new about description unchanged for around two weeks.

Then, and only then, the page name (the name you comment with) was changed.

 

And that’s it! You’re all set…

 

So to change your Page name you need to make sure you do these three things:

• Rebrand your Page

• Change your about section to a statement about your change and why it’s changing. For a few weeks your About section is like a lamp post poster for planning permission!

• Then change your Facebook Page name and click save and wait for Facebook to review it.

 

Facebook do make life difficult. With all the content we had to rebrand online when we changed to Spaghetti this was by far the hardest and longest changeover period.

They do check it and we did mess it up first time around.

 

Good luck, and give us a shout if you need any help.

Any questions about Facebook Page changes? Hit me up in the comments below…

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