Some recent changes to Facebook’s Pages platform have business owners scrambling to stay abreast of these changes, and as a bare minimum, business owners of all sizes should be aware of the differences on the Page publishing authorization. Your own business page may not have been affected yet, but the update to Page publishing authorization is at least interesting from the standpoint of giving an indication of Facebook’s future direction. Here’s information that all business owners should know about the changes recently implemented by Facebook.
What you need to know
The stated objective with these changes is to provide more authenticity and transparency between the owners of Pages, and their associated target audiences. One of the changes forces you to go through a two-step authorization process in order to confirm your identity, as well as to identify your country of origin. To fight against compromised accounts and fake pages, Facebook is also asking for additional information to confirm Page owner identities. For this purpose, a couple additional sections have been provided, including one called People Who Maintain This Page, which highlights the Page administrator and country of origin. There is also a Page History section, where you can see if any specific Page has been changed since its creation date.
Reason for the changes
Security and privacy concerns have never been emphasized more greatly than they are today, and Facebook like all other social media platforms, has been obliged to address these issues head-on. In their own words, Facebook is attempting to prevent organizations and individuals from misleading users about their identities and their intentions. In other words, Facebook is attempting to combat misinformation by Page owners, and guarantee to users that Page owners are legitimate. The changes to the Page publishing authorization process should go a long way toward achieving this goal. For legitimate Page owners, there will be very little impact and very little inconvenience.
Business owners who are affected
Although the intent of the updates by Facebook is to prevent malicious actions, many legitimate Page owners will be affected, along with those having malicious intent. As of December 12, 2018, all Page owners should begin noticing the People Who Manage This Page section, provided that you have a large audience. Although it is not clear what constitutes a ‘large’ audience, it’s safe to say that business owners with just a few followers will probably not be affected. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of followers, you can expect to see the authentic verification notification pop-up fairly soon on your Facebook Page.
If you are affected, you will see an alert banner similar to the one in your News Feed, and you’ll be requested to confirm your identity. You may not want to respond immediately to this, but if you don’t, you will be regularly reminded to do so until you’ve complied. If you choose not to provide the requested information and verification by the stated deadline, you will lose the privilege of posting to that particular Page. You may suddenly notice one day that you can no longer publish to Facebook, that your reach on the platform is suddenly limited, or you make be completely locked out of Facebook altogether.
If any of these situations occur to your account, you should double-check your identity, and you may have to also contact Facebook Help. Some business owners are worried about these changes, especially since there is a deadline associated with it. However, the true bottom line is that the vast majority of businesses will have absolutely nothing to worry about, since the authentication process is totally painless and can be done very quickly.
Resolving publishing issues
Any business owner who receives a request to confirm their identity would be well advised to simply comply with that request and provide the necessary information. Even if you have a problem with complying, to avoid any issues with publishing to the platform, it’s best to go along with the request, especially since the intention is to provide greater security and privacy for users. Facebook is aware that this process presents an inconvenience to its users, and has therefore made the verification process as simple and uncomplicated as possible.
The first thing you have to do is turn on two-factor authentication on your own business Facebook account. At this point, you’ll be given the option to confirm your account by using a third-party login code or via a text message. By navigating to the Security and Login section of Facebook Settings, you’ll just have to follow the identified steps to complete the process.
Step two in the verification process asks to confirm your location, which can be done by activating Location Services, so as to confirm that your country of origin is appropriate. This has to be done from a mobile device, and you will find Location Services under Location in your Facebook Settings. Facebook recommends updating the current city which is listed on your business profile, in the event that it might be out of date. This might seem to be a bit of a nuisance, but keeping your business information fresh and accurate is advantageous to your business as well as being necessary for Facebook compliance. Once your identity has been confirmed by Facebook, the alert banner that you received will go away, and you will be able to have the same Page publishing access as normal.
Confirming your changes
If you want to make sure that your updated authorization was successful, look for the identity confirmation display on your account. If the process was successful, you’ll see a message saying Identity Confirmed on each of the pages you manage. Keep in mind that if you should turn off Location Services or two-factor authorization at any point in the future, you’ll have to go through the authentication process again.This may seem to be something of a nuisance, but as mentioned previously, it can be a very quick and simple process, and after all, it’s really for your own benefit.
It’s certainly worth the little bit of trouble you have to go through, in order to stay in the good graces of Facebook so that you can take advantage of all the features offered on the platform. It’s also quite likely that more changes like this will be in the works by Facebook and other social media platforms in the future, as they attempt to maintain security and privacy for their users.
