How to get verified on Instagram this year. Today I'm going to be sharing via strategy on how I got my account verified. How I got many different clients, as well as students verified on Instagram, and how you can do this as well, which works 100% this year if you follow and understand these three principles. (upbeat music) Right now what I'm gonna be doing is I'm gonna be sharing with you some of the things on Instagram.
And the three things that Instagram looks for when it comes to getting verified. First of all why would you want to get verified? There's a lot of different perks to this. So you probably noticed when you look at a verified profile it's got this blue check mark ticked on the profile. But it's really not just for vanity purposes. There's a ton of benefits that comes with being verified. Some of them is, number one, if you start building a following it's very very normal that you get a ton of imposters and scammers and people trying to do identity theft. So with the blue check, people understand that this is the official account. On top of that if you have a verified account, if you were to comment on somebody else's Instagram post, your post together with all of the other verified accounts will always appear on top, so it gets you more visibility when you do so, when you engage other pages.
Also if you are looking at somebody else's story, they will also be able to see that a verified account has actually seen their story. So the odds of somebody looking at your profile and your visits to your profile will also dramatically increase. Other perks include if your account gets hacked, if somehow the scammer or the hacker deletes all your stuff which happens all the time, if you have a verified account you'll be able to escalate this to an actual support person. And they will be able to help your account back, and that is absolutely priceless.
Okay so with that said the list goes on. We can talk about all of the perks of being verified. But let's talk about what is Instagram actually look at when it comes to getting your account verified. So the first one over here is really authenticity. What that means is they wanna see that your account is from an actual real authentic person. So that means that they're not gonna verify some account if it's like a theme page, where it's just motivational quotes, or funny cat dog videos, or if it's just viral videos. So one of the things that you gotta constantly work towards is to make sure that when you submit your account for verification, which we'll talk about as well, they are actually seeing that it's authentic.
Now let's talk about, before I go to number two and three, which is gonna be way more important, let's talk about what the verification process is. If you were to go to Instagram, you'll see that on the top right hand side, there is this three lines, which you wanna click on. There is settings. Once you click on settings, you will be able to go to your account, and you will be able to notice that there is a option that says request verification. And you will notice that you'll be able to apply for Instagram verification.
Now on this page here, you can apply for this once every 30 days, so if you don't get it you can apply after 30 days. But one of the things that you will notice is they ask you to put in your details, a category for your account, and they want to make sure, notice they want you to attach a photo of your I.D. And the reason for that again is to make sure that it is authentic, this is a real person. So this is pretty basic, but number two, the second thing they look at is to make sure that it is unique. So the second thing that you wanna constantly do is making sure that the stuff that you put on isn't just re-posting viral videos, but to have some sort of original stuff that isn't found anywhere else. In order to secure this second requirement over here, it is having the balance between understanding what's proven to be viral, but not just straight off downloading a thing and uploading to your account.
One of the things you wanna do is to value add. So if you take a look at my Instagram account, I have a lot of different viral stuff but there's value added to that. So you take a look at my post every single day, I've got these viral images. Guess what, these viral images they are original which means they're all actually hand drawn by somebody from my team, illustrated. But at the same time, they are modeling something that is proven to work. So for you, you think about what makes your thing unique. This could be videos of you that you put up consistently. This could be images, this could be different quote cards. But at the same time having a hint of originality that makes it totally unique. Now that's the second thing they look at, but the most important one of them all is actually number three.
And number three is actually notability. They wanna make sure, and they wanna see if you are a notable person. And in their eyes notability really means whether you are well known, whether you are in news publications. And they have many different factors to determine whether you are notable or not. And right now I wanna show you this strategy where in their eyes you will be 100% notable. I don't see anyone else talking about this. This is how I got dozens of my students and clients verified but let's talk about what they are. The most obvious way is to get yourself published on news outlets by doing P.R. Now this is tough and this is the traditional way of how it gets done.
So one of the things that people do is the old school way is to get it publicist, and to get a publicist to get you on CNBC, ABC, FOX News. Literally, that's what I did to get verified on Instagram by showing them and submitting to them all of the different P.R. and press releases from my appearances on TV. But that's the first way to make sure that your stuff is being published on other people's platforms. Now this doesn't necessarily need to be traditional TV because that could be expensive, not to mention time consuming. But this could also be being featured on other platforms like Medium. There are a lot of different press releases, submissions, that's the first method. Now the second method that is going to be a whole lot cheaper, that will 100% get you verified. Are you ready, do you know what it is? So this is by being a published author.
And this is the thing that is going to give you the unfair advantage. I have many clients who did this strategy and they got verified in like two weeks. Let me share with you how this works. Now if you think about the hierarchy of professions, at the lowest is probably like salespeople. At the highest level in the Asian community, if you are not a doctor or an engineer, or a lawyer, then you're a failure. But what if I told that an author is up there if not above all those other professions in the eyes of society. For some weird reason, if you are a published author then all of a sudden it looks as though you've made it and you're some sort of celebrity in the eyes of many.
Instagram, even Facebook, it's the same thing. If you wanna show them that you are a notable person and it can prove to them you are a best selling author, you will get your account approved 100%. So the question now is how do you become a published author? Inexpensively, how do you actually get a book published on Amazon, submit it to Instagram to show them that you are a best selling author? Okay so first of all, let's talk about Amazon. So Amazon has got a print on demand service. So what that means is that unlike traditional publishing, you don't have to order 10,000 books, or commit to 10,000 books where your house ends up being a warehouse. They have this platform called CreateSpace.com, which is their publishing arm, where you could literally upload a Microsoft Word doc, slap on a graphic image and whenever somebody orders a copy, Amazon will literally print out one copy, ship it to that one person and it's print on demand. So there's no minimum order. If you get three sales the entire month, Amazon will print out three books, ship it to them, deal with the warehousing, shipping fulfillment, all kind of stuff, and at the end of each month pay you royalty.
One of the things you can do is get a very simple book. You could speak your book if you wanted to. So the thing that stops people from ever releasing their first book ever, even though they feel they got a book within them is they're always saying "Oh I'm waiting for inspiration," "I'm waiting for the right moment." Look it's never gonna be the right moment. What does that even mean? You gotta have the motion first, in order to get the emotion. Most people have it the other way around. They're waiting for the emotion first.
They're waiting for the feeling, the feeling of excitement, the feeling of being inspired in order to have motion. That's not how the real world works. You go through the motion first. You do the work even when you don't feel like doing it in order to have the emotion. Guess what, even when you don't feel like doing it, just get the table of contents out, you could speak your book, do a video like this one for 30 minutes, an hour. Get it transcribed, get a professional proofreader to do it for you. There are many different sites that will do it really inexpensively. You get this book up on Create Space. You get it published on Amazon. So now it's on Amazon, but it's not yet a bestselling book. Here's the thing about bestselling books that most people don't know.
Best selling books today means absolutely nothing. Many times people say "Oh, I am a bestselling author." And the truth is, even on my Instagram profile I am a bestselling author. In fact, I have been a number one Amazon bestseller when my book came out. However, it's important to understand that when you submit to Instagram, what they wanna see is your book being actually listed and published, and to see if you're a bestseller. There's no such thing as a bestselling author. There's such thing as a number one New York Times bestselling author. But there's no such thing as bestselling author. Like what does that even mean? So here's what most people do.
They put it on Amazon, if you wanna get verified, on the same day if you can get your friends to go and support you and buy this book. By the way, you can list if for 99 cents on Kindle. Get a couple of friends to support you. And you put it in some obscure listing that you know will get you on the top ten. So what some people do is they put it on Amazon and they put it at some weird combination. They put it like hobbies for women over 40, under knitting, or something like that, right? So it's like three categories down and guess what? It takes like ten sales to be a number one that day. You can take this screenshot of you, your book being number one, submit it to Instagram. Now understand something. The person that is going through this verification process, they're not marketers.
They look it as like "Hey, this person has a book." Therefore, this person must be notable. So all you need to do is submit that and get verified. Now understand that this is a marketing tool in order to get verified, the method that I used was through the press releases, being on TV the traditional way. But we have done this for dozen of students, and I guarantee you when you do this, you will get verified as well. Hey, let me know in the comments what your biggest takeaway is from the video, but this is literally how you get verified, guaranteed.
And as always if you love this video, hit the comment button and I will see you in future videos..
Instagram has finally rolled out an option where you could apply to be verified, so before, you had to pay some agencies thousands of dollars and really there was no good way to get verified. Nobody knew how to do it. There was a lot of scam videos and emails going around to show you how to get verified. So finally Instagram put a stop to it by letting you apply yourself and I'm gonna show you how to set it up in this video. If it's your first time here, I have almost a hundred Instagram videos and a lot more tech videos on this article, so please consider subscribing, to get the latest updates on all the apps and technology.
So let's go through the process here of applying, so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go to my profile here. So on your profile page, you should see those three dots on the top right corner go, ahead and press that and that will take you to the settings option on the very bottom. So click settings and if you scroll down, right under switch to business profile, you should see request verification. At the moment of this recording, this is available worldwide for iOS devices, so it should be on your iPhone, but it will soon roll out to the Android. So right now if you don't see it make sure you update your app but if you have an Android wait a few more days. It's very important to do this right away in fact watching this video make sure you go through the verification process, because I'm sure they're gonna get backlogged very quickly after this process because everyone's gonna do it in the first couple of weeks so what you need to do here is you need to put in your full name so go ahead and type in your full name or your business name or whatever you're trying to get verified here and then once you do that, you need to choose a file from your photo library or from taking a photo, because this is how they are going to verify you but it is still unlikely to get verified. They're not just gonna give this out to anybody just because their name and their ID matches, they still want this to be for people that have a social media presence on Instagram and be on instagram.
There's no follower limitations. I've seen people with a couple of thousand followers having it but again make sure you go through this process and if you don't get verified just keep building, keep building, build a LinkedIn profile build a facebook profile, build your social media presence Try to get publications about your business or your personal name and then try again, but right now I recommend you do this because it's in the very first few days and the chances get a verified and Instagram not having a huge backlog just yet is very high. I hope you found this useful. I know this process is a little bit frustrating and getting verified is not as simple as just clicking a button, but having this request verification option is your best bet. Please give this video a thumbs up and comment to this article. I post social media videos just like this one five times a week and I hope to see you on the next video.
how's it going everybody my name is Chris howl and I have verified Instagram account at that little blue checkmark the sought-after verified account it's actually the probably the most asked questions I get in my DM is like oh how'd you get how'd you get verified I drew the blue checkmark how'd you get verified I don't know why people are saying it like that but essentially in this week's video I'm gonna tell you my story on how I got verified an explanation of what a verification means and essentially a few tips on how you guys could potentially get verified PS i
- Today, we're gonna talk about Instagram verification. What is it? Do you need it? And how to get it, coming up next. So, what exactly is Instagram verification? If you're using Instagram at all, you've probably seen on some accounts that little blue check mark next to the username. For a lot of people, this is something that they just absolutely have to have. It's a status symbol. It's kind of that badge of pride or a badge of honor that they have on their account showing that they're Instagram verified. They're really cool. Instagram loves 'em, and people love 'em, and they're a verified account. So is it really necessary for a small business to be verified on Instagram? Now, if your entire goal is just to grow to a level where you get that blue check mark, and that's kind of like your arrival point.
Now, you're happy, this is what you wanted. You're clearly marked as kind of an influencer, then sure, take the steps and the effort to get there. But as a small business, is it truly important to you? Essentially, does this blue check mark on your name actually create more sales or more opportunities for sales? That's something to consider. Now, getting a blue-check verification or this Instagram verification is not really a difficult process. What's difficult is actually qualifying. Now, back in the day, it was one of those things where you could just wake up one morning and pull up your Instagram, throw open the app, and go, "Oh my gosh, I'm verified. "I got my blue check mark." All Instagram did was their algorithm kinda hunted down where is there a lot of engagement? Who has a lot of followers? Are they posting a lot? And it just kind of arrived.
You just kinda showed up. And what that ended up causing is a bit of a black market for this blue-check verification. There is reports of people paying upwards of $10,000 to a friend of a friend that knew somebody who worked at Facebook or Instagram and was able to verify the account, and they took a cut, and then your friend of a friend took a cut. You're just paying an incredible amount of money for this verification. Problem with that is, one, it goes against Instagram's terms of service, because that's ridiculous. And two, if Instagram ever found out, they just took the check mark away, and you're out five grand or you're out 10 grand, and you're no longer verified. Even worse, they may have just straight deleted your profile. So Instagram, a couple of months ago, decided to change this up. So instead of just kind of being at the whim of the algorithm, now you have an opportunity to apply, and you can apply your profile, and kind of put this into the running to get this blue-check verification.
Now, there's still a lot of misinformation out there, and there are still some agencies or some black-hat companies and individuals that are still preying on small businesses, influencers, people that want to grow on Instagram. They're still preying on them and saying that they can guarantee blue-check verification, and if you pay them, you'll get it. You can't. Now, maybe you would be able to find someone who still knows a guy or still knows a girl that works there and is willing to do this and things like that, but you're still running incredible, incredible risk of just losing your money, never actually getting verified, or worse, having your profile deleted, especially after a lot of time and effort.
That could be just a critical error, a real problem for a business or an influencer. You just lose everything and you start over. So there's not a good reason to do that. Now, that misinformation and these brands and businesses that are trying to sell verification, they're out there. You can Google it. You can look them up online, and half the time, they'll come to you or they'll send you DMs on Instagram, swearing up and down that they can get you verified. I'll let you in on a secret. All you have to do is pull out your phone, open up the app, go into settings, and go through the verification. All you're doing is applying for it. That allows Instagram to review your application, and then decide whether or not you need to be verified. Now, just because it's a simple process does not mean that it is easy to get verified. Instagram has a couple of different rules that they try to follow, a couple of guidelines that they try to use in order to ensure that they're just not verifying everybody.
All right, if every account has a blue check then it doesn't even matter anymore. That's the issue that Twitter went through. They were verifying just about everybody, and now, for almost a year now, they've shut down their application process for verifications because it just got so out of hand. So Instagram's pretty particular about this. You need to have a large following, or at least large enough and large enough engagement to make it look like there's some value associated with your profile. Don't take this as the idea of, I need to buy followers or anything like that. Buying followers is an incredible way to get your account deleted, and there's zero value there. The number doesn't actually matter. In fact, Instagram is testing in Canada, getting rid of actual follower counts.
So you look at an account, and you're like, "Do I wanna follow this profile?" Yes or no, not based on, do I wanna follow this profile because four, five, six million other people also follow it. So follower counts, if that test goes well, that's not even gonna matter. So don't buy followers, it's incredibly unimportant, and it can hurt your account. But, do you have a decent engagement? That's a lot of what they're looking for.
Beyond that, is there a viable business reason to verify you? And this viable business reason, what they're looking for is, is there a risk to you or a risk to people that follow you that they would accidentally get you confused with a different profile, all right? Is your profile extremely similar to another? Or worse, is another profile stealing your content or pretending to be you, or things like that? For our Marketing 360 Instagram, we're a verified account. And that was a process that we had to go through, because there were a lot of people that were stealing our content, not giving us credit back for it, or even worse, pretending to be us.
Some were based here in the U.S., some weren't. They're all over the place stealing our content, pretending to be us, and that was a really big problem. So we wanted to go through the process of actually getting verified, so that when someone goes to our Instagram, Marketing 360, they're able to understand that with that blue-check verification, we are who we say we are. Anybody else claiming to be Marketing 360 is not, all right? And it gives us more control over our content and more control over that piece of mind that users can see. Now, if you're a plumber in New Jersey, do you need to be Instagram verified? Maybe not. At the end of the day, does that verification equal more business for you? Now, it may equal more business for us, possibly.
Is there really value there? Well, for us, we just wanna make sure there's trust, and trust can infer value down the road. More trust equals more sales. But for a plumber or an electrician or even a gym or an influencer or something like that, you always have to really consider, does this blue check really matter? And if you're gonna go through all the effort and the energy of trying to get it, growing your account, growing your engagement, making sure that people aren't trying to spoof or steal from your account, things like that, all you're really gonna do is find that you've got great value, right? And the blue check may come naturally, or you may apply for it down the road and see more value out of it, but keep in mind that that shouldn't always be the absolute end goal.
The end goal of Instagram, really at the end of the day, just needs to be, am I providing great value and am I seeing the engagement that proves to me that my users are also seeing this great value? So when you're going through this application process, yes, you need to have a large follower count or a large enough. You need to have engagement. That's significantly more important. There needs to be a business-use-case scenario as to why this is important, both for your company and for Instagram. Are you being spoofed or stolen from? Are there other fake accounts out there pretending to be you? And then, there's also this little bit of ambiguity. Does Instagram believe that there is value to them to verify you? If they verify you, will that increase the trust that their users have in Instagram? Or will your profile be able to bring in more users, more people that are consistently coming to the app, consistently engaging with your profile and others? And at that point, also, seeing ads, right? 'Cause at that point, there's a revenue example or a revenue reason for Instagram to want to do that.
So all those different scenarios kind of go into this whole application process, so keep that in mind. Now, it's not just, "I want the check mark." It's, "Is there a reason for me to have this check mark?" All right, so there we go. Now, you have it. Now, do you need the Instagram check mark? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. It's really up to your business. Big thing here, don't fall prey to these companies that try to steal from small business and steal from influencers, trying to say that they can sell you or guarantee you a check mark.
They can't. We get this question all the time. "Can you get me a blue check mark?" And we'll tell everybody, no we can't, but we'll help you on the path to get to a point where it makes sense. Can we guarantee it? No, anyone who says they can, they're lying. So keep all that in mind. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you've got questions, please be sure to leave them in the comments below. We love your questions. We try to get them all answered as fast as we can.
If there's other videos you'd like us to create, just let us know, and we'll create some more videos and talk on these topics some more. Thanks for watching, liking, and subscribing, and happy marketing. (upbeat music).
How to get verified on instagram.