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I have a Google Voice number which I would like to list on Facebook so people can contact me with it. When I try to enter the number in my Facebook profile under either the "Mobile Phones" section or "Add other phones", two places where I'm trying to enter my phone number

then Facebook says "Please enter a valid phone number."

the error message

From what I've read around the web, I suspect this is because Facebook doesn't want people using VOIP numbers to create accounts, as a crude form of tying accounts to real people. For purposes of this question, I'm fine with Facebook having my real cell phone number on file, but I would like to be able to display my Google Voice number on my profile, and I can't seem to do that. Facebook flat-out refuses to even show the number.

I've searched the web and found a couple procedures that claim to allow you to add a GV number to Facebook, most promising being this page from the Facebook community forums, but that procedure fails at the third step: where it says "The number will save!", instead I get the error message shown in the second image above. Note that, again, I'm not trying to make my GV number my primary number as the page is describing, I'm just trying to make it show up on my profile for people to see.

Is there any way to make this work?

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  • I've had a Google Voice number for years, and it's been on Facebook account as long as I've had an account. This seems like a flaw in Facebook's validation.
    – ale
    Sep 9, 2017 at 18:56
  • Agreed, though I don't expect to have any luck asking them to fix it. In fact, I've noticed that all the sources I've read which tell you how to add a GV number to Facebook are old, and unanswered questions about how to do it are newer, suggesting that they may have recently changed their validation algorithm to block Voice numbers.
    – David Z
    Sep 10, 2017 at 2:15

1 Answer 1

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You have to remove your current phone number in FB before you can add the GV #. This will allow you to select Google as your carrier, as you cannot select it if you already have a primary number set.

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    Craig, since you made such a drastic change to the answer in your edit, if the downvotes came before the edit, I think it would be best to delete this and repost it. Normally deleting and reposting is a bad idea, but you've turned this into an entirely different answer from what people presumably voted on, which makes it a bit of a special case. And of course, for future reference, only things which actually do answer the question should be posted as answers. (If the downvotes came after the edit, then ignore what I said.)
    – David Z
    Oct 3, 2017 at 5:32
  • This aboslutely worked for me, to my surprise. Thanks.
    – Ivan X
    Jan 16, 2020 at 18:09

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