I notice occasionally on Facebook that my friends have fun little icons adjacent to their names. I want one too! Do you know what I’m talking about? What do I need to go for one to be adjacent to my profile name?
Facebook badges are actually associated with Facebook groups and are set up at the option of the group administrators. If you look closely at your newsfeed, every time you see someone who has an icon adjacent to their name, it’s actually a group posting. Well, except for the few people who are verified and then get a little blue checkmark next to their names, that is!
In some groups, the badges seem to be assigned automatically, so if you post lots of content that’s popular, you can get a special designation, if you’re new, you might have something different, etc. But in many groups, they are set up to use badges and just forgot to tell everyone that the badges are available! I’m in a dad’s group on Facebook that has quite a range of badges available for members, but my informal scan of hundreds of comments suggested that not one person – even the admins! – have ever availed themselves of this feature.
Let’s start by showing what I’m talking about:
Put the cursor over the badge and it explains that this is the designation for a new user. I thought perhaps he was a fan of jazz hands, but nope, it’s just a way for people to identify the newbies in the group.
Then there’s this:
This badge means that this person is part of the administrative team for this group, a little shield. Very official, right?
To find whether you can pick a badge for yourself, you want to go to the “•••” menu on the top of the group’s page:
See the blue “+ Invite” button? Right below that is the “•••” button you want. Click on it and a menu pops up:
As (subtly) highlighted, choose “Manage badges” if it’s an option. If it’s not an option, well, then you can’t set up a badge for yourself in this particular group, unfortunately.
With this group in question, however, there are a number of options from which to choose:
Pretty fun and it would be useful if more people in this group were using badges, but at least I can choose one for myself. The default is ‘none’ which is why so few people actually have one selected. Also notice that you can’t choose multiple, it’s a one-or-the-other selection.
I’m going to choose “Young Adults” because my children are now 23, 20 and 16, so I’ve been doing this parenting thing for rather a while at this point…
A click on “Save” and I get an error message!
But guess what? It actually worked just fine. I can tell because when I look at one of my posts, it now shows the Facebook badge (and its description where appropriate):
That’s pretty cool, actually. And if I comment on a post, just the badge icon shows up:
Of course whether anyone else in the group will understand that particular icon is another story, but that’s what you were asking about so now you know: it’s related to Facebook Groups and the group administrators have to enable it (and choose the set of badges) for it to be available. Good luck!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Facebook since the site launched for the public. I have a lot of Facebook help here on the site, so please do check it out while you’re visiting. Thanks!