“Will the real slim shady please stand up?”
Like all other social networks Facebook has tons of pages and profiles which are duplicates or pages that try to mimic original brands, businesses and public figures. In an attempt to curb the problem, Facebook finally launched verified pages and profiles recently.
Twitter had verified pages since June 2009 and Google Plus rolled them out in 2011. Facebook’s verified pages will be available on desktop as well as mobile web. It believes that this latest development will help users find the real accounts of celebrities, journalists, government officials, and popular brands and businesses.
So what will the verification badge look like and where will it be seen?
The verification badge will be quite similar to that we are used to on Twitter. It will be a check mark surrounded by a different shade of blue. Facebook says that the badge will appear next to the name of the page and in the graph search queries. It will also appear when you hover over a page name, in news feed ads and in stories that slide in the news feeds about people liking a page.
Above image is an example of a verified account. Several celebrity accounts including Canadian singer Justin Bieber have been verified. Marrk Zuckerberg and his sister Randi have received the blue check mark too.
Here is another example of how it verified accounts look when you type in the Facebook search box:
How do I get my business verified on Facebook?
The simple answer is you don’t need to do anything. For now Facebook is taking charge of this task by itself and there is no action required to be taken by page/profile/business owners. This is similar to how Twitter manages verified profiles. You can of course click here to report a fake / duplicate account if you come across one.
In the social media world, posts can go viral pretty quickly which is why it is important to distinguish the authentic from the fake. It will be interesting to see how Facebook recognizes and rolls this out to smaller local businesses in the near future.