Facebook is reportedly rolling out verifications for local business pages in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Now local businesses will be able to represent themselves on the social network in a manner that shows that they’re the real deal and not impostors, which is something that will become increasingly important and people engage in more monetary transactions on Facebook.
According to Marketing Land, the verified badges have already started rolling out to businesses in the aforementioned countries. The publication has confirmation from Facebook, and shares some comments from the company:
The badges will help people “find the right and authentic accounts” for local merchants, Kirsten Bury, a Facebook product marketing manager for Pages, told Marketing Land. Verified Pages will also show up higher in search results.
“At scale there will inevitably be duplicates and multiple entries for the same business,” said Bury, noting that there are 45 million business Pages on Facebook. “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.”
So there’s some Facebook SEO value here, and businesses won’t definitely won’t want to skip getting verified if they’re eligible. If the feature is available to you, you should be able to go to the Page settings and use your business phone number to get a verification.
Following this roll-out, Facebook will verify local business pages in other countries. According to Marketing Land, Facebook also intends to roll the feature out to all business Pages eventually.
Historically, it’s only been available to celebrities, sports teams, public figures, and media outlets.
Image via Facebook