How to get verified on Twitter

This is something I wrote two years ago when I was verified as a personal Twitter account on @Know. I became verified as @imAnton and then I changed to @RetweetMore and I was still verified because I was tweeting as Anton Perlkvist. When I had 130,000 followers I changed my Twitter account to a quote page, and I lost my verification status since I therefore wasn't tweeting anything personal at all -- I was only a quote page.

FAQs about verified accounts, read more here.

Anyway, I wrote this for a year ago, it was originally an email that I sent to 25 different friends and business partners since I didn't have the time to make one personal email each.  A few of them got verified because of me, some failed. Some of the people I sent this email to had many Twitter followers, some are more "famous" than other and some have many reasons and some... just want to get verified, well because they want to. You have to accept that everyone cannot get verified, but I am sure that most people who deserves to get verified can get verified. I hope to help you but I can not help everyone; if you don't have enough reasons, it's tough love. 

I'll try to be as easy and straight on the point as possible but I also want you to understand everything about this. Lets go.

What does Twitter verify?

You can get verified if you're paying for advertising on Twitter for more than $5,000, otherwise It's about whether you're deemed to be a valid "celebrity" and in need of verification by the Twitter Staff, whether you have contacted them through appropriate channels, and if they can verify who you are through official sources.

Verification is mostly done for, for example celebrities, big companies, brands and music bands etc; because those have many people interesting in what they are doing. Simple. It's important that their audience can believe they are the real deal so, for example, no fake accounts can take their credits. Since Twitter shut down the public verification system since early 2010 (and either laid off or repurposed the staff previously assigned to handle the task), the method for getting verified has been made non-public and rather slipshod. At the moment, here's the only way to get verified what I know unless Twitter contacts you personally (they always do with very big in-need verification accounts). 

The only reason I know, unless you have management with contacts at Twitter:

1 You must have a representation (a manager or talent agency) with a physical office and a known presence in the entertainment community.

2 Your management/you must contact Twitter's physical office in San Francisco with reasons.

Reasons?

Twitter would love to verify each and every twitter user (and I would love to help each and every one) but that would be almost impossible. So they only spend time on what's important and easy to verify. How will you be as easy as possible to verify?

Copyright: Picture from twitter.com

How you contact Twitter matters

You ought to be trustworthy and it should be easy to see that you deserve being verified. 

• Do you have a website? Seems like there is no celebrity who doesn't have a website and therefore it's basically a must for popular people to have a website. 
• Have you been on bigger online websites/Newspapers/Television or something public that you can give source to? 
• Is it something special with you that really many people are interested in? 
• Do you have MANY followers compared to something similar; in your arena, in your niche are you special because of something? etc etc. 
• Are your Twitter account growing a lot? Are there many people reacting to your tweets? Are you very influencing? 
• Do you have a representation (this helps a lot and seems almost always to be the key part. Mostly it's only famous people who have representations: for example, I had 2 representations when I got verified, a company and a business person who were working for me 1-2 days per week). 
• Do you only tweet original content? 
• Have you been on Twitter for many years? How do you use Twitter and what's your future plans? What will a verification mean = how will it help you and why would anyone care if you got verified, does it even matter if you're verified or not? I mean, why would Twitter even care about wasting work for a verification process just because of you? Would it make Twitter a better place if you went verified or not?

So, it's a lot of information but yes, in the end, all Twitter wants is enough trustworthy reasons while feeling that it's a need to get the verification process going for you.

So, if you have enough reasons (it was only some examples I mentioned above, feel free to add whatever you think would be of value)... then you need to know how to reach the Twitter team: it's many ways to contact them;

Best way is probably visiting them in person knocking on their HQ door in San Fransisco having an appointment scheduled. That's not easy for everybody. Next best and most reliable way is sending a physical letter to them; their address is down in this blog post. An other way to get this done is by just mailing them; I did double mail them by filling this support form: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general (I chosed Regarding Profile settings, not sure if that's the best one but it's worth a shot) and I also mailed them through help@twitter.com; you'll notice that this email isn't listed on the site. It's only found thorugh knowing someone at Twitter...  

You'll send them an email stating your need for verification. Provide contact phone numbers and names of management staff, their numbers and so on. Twitter will call that number, verify it's real, and they can get the verification rolling. But key is probably that you have representation.

While the email method is faster (it "only" took 9 days for me)... the physicals mail method is more reliable and gets more attention (I know friends who have done this). The hard part though is that the process is kept very secretive these days. No one tells people, not even celebs, how to get verification done, and many agents don't know how to get this done.

Don't forget to mentioning all the contact details to you and your representation so Twitter easily can contact you what's missing or can send you a contact packet for your business. 

And again, this takes time. Make sure to have patience. Don't get too frustrated; it will most commonly take more than 1 week to even receive an answer about the process. Have no stress. I hope that this helps you and get your needs met. 

Twitter's post address if you want to send them a physical letter about the verification:

Twitter, Inc.

795 Folsom St., Suite 600

San Francisco, CA 94107

Good luck!

Anton Perlkvist, The Twitter Entrepreneur

Follow me on Twitter TWITTER.COM/FUN