How To Change Your Business Name on Facebook

Have you recently re-branded your business? Changed your business name entirely? at your Facebook Page name perhaps? Regardless of which category you fall into, there’s a good chance you’ll want to edit your Facebook Page name to either reflect the changes or rectify the error.

Now, at first this might seem like a straightforward endeavour – surely you just have to edit your profile… right?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. In fact, for those of us with over 200 ‘likes’, changing your Facebook Page name is not an easy task. The Facebook Help Centre doesn’t provide much assistance either, with the only answer to changing your name being that, well, you can’t.

This is clearly a big problem for businesses that have spent time and effort building their fan base. Indeed, many businesses I have spoken to have had to create an entirely new page from scratch and while they can ask existing fans to ‘like’ the new page, the conversion rate of an attempt such as that is slim.

I had a client who was recently in this situation. They changed the name of their business then they updated the website following SEO guidelines when rebranding a company in order to not lose any traffic, their direct marketing materials and their logo accordingly.

However, when they tried to update their Facebook name, they hit a wall. They simply couldn’t do it and thought that the only solution was to delete the page entirely and start from scratch with the new name.

Because I like to see myself as a social media superwoman, I took it upon myself to save the day and save their Facebook page from imminent deletion. I’m happy to report that in the end, I was able to help them change their business name on Facebook AND keep all their fans. It was the ultimate win-win scenario.

What you’ll need before you start:

• Current page name
• Desired page name. You must ensure that your new name meets the Page Name Guidelines
• The reason for changing (i.e.: are you adding more information to your page name? Re-branding your page? Fixing a spelling error?)
• Documentation showing the name and address of your business that proves authenticity such as a phone bill

Step by Step Process

**Updated for 2017**

1. Click About on the left side of your Page
   
2. Click Edit Page Info
   
   a new window will open
   
3. Enter a new Page name and click Save Changes
   
   
4. Review your request and click Request Change

Old Method of Changing Facebook name

How to change your Facebook page name:

1. Navigate to the Facebook page you want to change.
2. In the Admin Panel, click on Edit Page then click on Update Public Info.

3. Next to your current Page name is a link titled ‘Request Change’. Click on this link.

4. Follow the prompts to the form ‘I need to change the name of my Page’. Ensure that you check the relevant boxes and select what your page represents, in this case, ‘A business or company’.

5. Enter your current Page name.

6. Enter your desired Page name. Select your name carefully because you can only change names once!

7. Select the reason for changing your Page name from the drop down menu.

8. Upload an official document
This helps prove that the name of your business has changed. Accepted documents include phone bills, utility bills or of course, business name registration forms.

9. Click send.

After you have completed these steps, you will receive an email from Facebook stating that they may be able to help with your request and that changes may take up to 3 days to process. In my case, I received a response the next day informing me that the name change had been approved! Mission successful.

This situation shows that using Facebook to promote your company can be quite a challenge, most of company owners already have a lot of things to think about and just don’t spend enough time using social media as a communication channel.

If you aren’t seeing any results out of your efforts on social media, it might be time to look for a Social Media Management service that will come up with strategies to drive valuable traffic to your website and handle with small problems like this one.

I hope this post helps you in your Facebook name changing endeavours – if so, comment below!

** UPDATE ** – The ‘page info’ page has been updated since this post was written. To find the page request link, access your ‘Page Info’ page, and then click on ‘edit’ in the ‘Name’ row, as shown below:

** NOTE FOR READERS ** if these steps don’t work for you, unfortunately we cannot help you any further. Please don’t comment or call us for support as we are not Facebook.