How to Change your Facebook Business Page URL More Than Once

Face book business pages iconSo after a lot of searching myself it turned out to be that this is a fairly common problem that is around, but no real solution is available, so here I am writing on how to change your Facebook business page URL more than once! Unfortunately there is no easy way around this, its a long process and you should be aware that you will still lose any interaction and comments from other users.

HELP! I Accidentally Renamed a Facebook Page to the Wrong Username

To give you some context, I had two facebook pages, and I was meant to rename one to a certain URL, however I ended up making the mistake of renaming the wrong one, and turns out… that was my only chance. A simple human error caused a wave of issues to come crashing down on me like a tsunami and it was a bit of a catastrophe to start.

I tried submitting the issue left right and centre to different kinds of Facebook support requests, heck we even messaged Mark Zuckerberg himself! Naturally, he didn’t reply but I was reaching my wits end.

But alas, none of it really worked, I say not really… I mean not at all. Our last chance was to try and submit a page merge request. We couldn’t recover the URL so our tactic was to create a clone of the original Facebook page, statuses and pictures included as this was vital to keep on the page, along with its likes and just about everything else you could think of. Through this we could then submit the page to be merged with the old one with the wrong URL to clear it.

What we did to rename the facebook page and retain the content.

  1. Recreated the Whole Facebook Page on a new page.
  2. Merged the old page into the new one.
  3. Renamed the newly merged pages to the correct URL/username

Take note once you merge the old one with the new, EVERYTHING from the old one will be gone, so if you need to retain that information you’ll have to do what we had to do. Let it be known that this action does however keep your likes on your page, so if that’s vital like it was to us then this method is your best and only option.

Naturally as you might assume this was a pretty lengthy task, this took 3 days to recreate, and 2 weeks from the start to completion process. Although this is daunting I’m sure with any business it’s important you keep the content and structure so it was worth it. Do take note though, we did span back a few years in our posts and got all the pictures, but it’s safe to say for a business page ours was fairly light on content so if you’ve got lots of content, well you may be looking at a lot of work ahead.

Download all your Facebook Galleries

We used www.picknzip.com for picture downloads in bulk, it took a bit to get started but it did them all and it did it fantastically. Content: There was a LOT of copy and pasting, and date alterations to make it all look exactly like the original. This was really really frustrating but as I said, it’s just got to be done. Title, “About” description, and everything you can imagine all had to be the same.

How to Do a Merge Request on Facebook

Once this was finally over (thank god), the merge request could begin. Before you do this though, make sure both pages you want to merge are published.

Please note that there is only one denial email, and it’s the exact same one every time, so you’re left with a bit of ambiguity on what went wrong. Here’s what we got as a response:

“Subject: Merge Request Denied

Hello,
Your request to merge {source_page_name} into {target_page_name} has been denied. Your Page names are too unrelated to merge at this time. To ensure that submitted merges are processed, please change the name of {source_page_name} before attempting to merge again.
For more information regarding Pages, please visit the Help Center:
https://www.facebook.com/help/pages
The Facebook team”

 

My issue seemed to be that both the pages were not published. But rather than tell me that I just got the same default response every request.

So with both of the pages having the same content, I submitted the merge request to Facebook. At this point I was not actually aware where to do this so we googled it, taking us to a Facebook page to merge it. Don’t use this one, it just doesn’t really work, even though it’s a legitimate link.

How was it fixed?

To do it the right way, you can do this by going to the new page that you just created, click settings at the top, going to general, and then clicking the “Merge pages” section in here.

facebook-settings

Now that you’re in here, ensure that the new page is at the top and the one you want to get rid of is on the selection of pages you want to merge. I can’t stress that enough, cause if you do it wrong you’ll have to repeat that process all over again, and trust me, you do not want that!

facebook-merge

All that needs to be done has been now, so we just need to click to send it off now at the bottom. Last thing to do is just to check that both pages are published so they can approve your merge request and away you go on your new page! With this, you now have completely wiped the other Facebook page and transferred the likes.

Point to note: You can now use the same URL or Username that you had on the original merged page, i.e. it’s no longer locked out from use.

With the deletion of the previous page you have now opened up your ability to change your Facebook business page URL again, and you will be able to leave with an ounce of satisfaction and an overwhelming desire to never have to do that again. We hope this helped you!

To Re-cap:

  1. Start a new Facebook page
  2. Copy over all the content you need
  3. Settings > General > Merge Pages
  4. Put the new one on the one you want to keep
  5. Old one on the bit to merge
  6. Ensure both pages are published
  7. Submit merge request
  8. Once accepted, change URL to the desired name

It’s not quick and it’s not pretty. You will lose certain things but until facbook make this easier this is your only solution.

Have you had any experience with renaming a facebook page more than once? Or been stuck in a similar situation?  Post below!

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