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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know Facebook charges businesses for changing the name of Facebook Page. Is this a well known fact?

Your name becomes locked after 200 likes: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=271607792873806

For the username, everyone (including users) is allowed one name change.

Presumably, Facebook can bypass these seemingly arbitrary limitations, but will essentially charge you for the right to do so (by requiring you to have purchased a certain amount of advertising with them).

This seems pretty reasonable, as the potential for abuse for arbitrary name changes is very high.

But at the same time is very normal a change of name, because companies adquires other companies, products can change the name too[1], etc... The Facebook page is supposedly owned by the creator, not Facebook and if a change of the name is needed, IMO it does not make sense to try to charge money from it.

I'm with you that F must have some restrictions on name change, but it does not seem reasonable to charge money for it.

[1] Imagine a page called "Sun Microsystems - Java" before being buyed by Oracle with a fer thousands fans. I'm sure a hight percent of the fans would not care of have a name change to "Oracle - Java" for example.

They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month.

Well, apparently there is an exception from this rule. Obviously there is a huge potential for abuse when changing name of a page that has plenty of users. However, allowing only the "money making" pages to do so is a bit of an unfair move in my opinion. Reasonable but unfair.

I wonder if this situation will escalate and fb will publish some explanation. Nevertheless, it is still hard to believe for me that a company with such value would fake clicks at all or in a way that is easy to detect.

According to the FAQ, one cannot change the name of the page once it is set. This can be a real problem that I run into quite a few times, even with a couple of small pages, and even more as every website that has "like this page on facebook" has an automatic facebook page, where the name is determined by them, automatically, once, by the <title> element at that time. Talk about stupid.

Anyways, I don't mind since I'm a small fish, but the longer this goes on, the more it will (hopefully, i might say) blow up into their face(book).

Why not open a new page, and delete all content (but a link to the new page) off the old page?

You lose all your Likes.

Oh no!

Which is presumably why this is a policy in the first place...

Facebook allows advertisers to target friends of users who liked your page. They probably restrict name changes so users associated with a page don't get blind-sided if the company radically changes its product or service.

The only well known fact when dealing with Facebook is that if you want to manipulate their documented rules you need to either have deep pockets or a lot of influence.

We tried to change the name of our page from "Hit Tennis 2" to "Hit Tennis". (After releasing Hit Tennis 3, we realized a per version FB page was silly.) We were asked to explain the change and it was denied (as I recall they said it could lead to user confusion). I thought that was a bit picky, but I understand the position of being careful of changing their likes our from underneath users. No mention of having to pay to get our name changed.

You can change your username (facebook.com/username) once, for free.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151098204101337...

After that, it's unclear.

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