Facebook Starting To Roll Out Verified Badges For Local Business Pages

For the first time, Facebook is going to be verifying official Pages for local businesses, starting in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and New Zealand before expanding globally in the coming months.

Verified Pages of local businesses, which is initially limited to companies with a physical address, will have a publicly visible gray badge on their Facebook Page, indicating an official stamp of authenticity.

The social media giant started rolling out its verified badges for local businesses this week. The badges come in the form of gray check marks to differentiate them from the blue checks that are displayed on verified Pages for celebrities, public figures, sports teams and other media and entertainment organizations.

“We are expanding our Verified Pages program to include local businesses for the first time,” explained Kirsten Bury, a Facebook product manager for Pages. “Now, local businesses in New Zealand can add a badge to their Page that lets people know they’re visiting that company’s official Facebook presence. We plan to extend Verified Pages for local businesses to more countries soon.”

The new badges will be displayed in Facebook search results and Pages in the familiar way:

Bury told Marketing Land that the badges will help people “find the right and authentic accounts” for local merchants. Additionally, Verified Pages will 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.”

The feature can be accessed within a Page’s admin settings in the countries where it is currently available. Business owners can choose to verify their Pages immediately by using the publicly listed phone number for their company, or they can verify by uploading an official document like a phone bill, which is a process that Facebook says will take several days to complete.

Over the coming weeks, the social media giant plans to introduce the feature in other markets, with the idea to eventually roll it out to all business Pages, regardless of whether or not they display their company’s physical location on Facebook.