Facebook Adds Verified Accounts, Following Twitter’s Lead
How legit is that star’s Facebook page? We’re about to find out.
Taking a page from rival Twitter’s playbook, Facebook has announced it is slowly rolling out “verified” pages for celebrities, journalists, brands and other public figures and entities with large audiences.
This step is another way that the social media giant is moving in on Twitter’s turf, shifting from a focus on friendly conversations with known associates to a broadcasting platform for public figures (a main driving point for Twitter that was also MySpace’s strategy when Facebook took down the social network in the later part of the last decade).
According to the Pew Research Center’s annual social media report, Facebook is still the top social media site, bringing in 67% of Internet users. The Pew study, which was released in February, reports that 16% of Internet users use Twitter. However, earlier this month, Nielsen reported that Facebook had lost 10 million visitors in the United States over the past year.
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