Facebook Must – Claim Vanity URL

I’ve noticed that some people have not yet claimed their vanity url @Facebook. When you create a Facebook account you can claim this simply by accessing the following url:

http://facebook.com/username

You can then change the long url for your profile – something like http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=12122121212 to something like:

http://facebook.com/hackmanj

This is particularly important for Fan pages (Also called Facebook Pages). Since you typically create these pages because you want people interested in your brand to join, you want to make it easy for them to access it. There is one caveat – you must have 100 fans in order to claim a vanity url for a fan page. You can always invite your friends to join you. I manage a number of Facebook fan pages – mostly for non profits that I support. Here are a few examples of Vanity URL’s for Fan pages:

http://www.facebook.com/mkwc2010

http://www.facebook.com/managedsolutions

Now here are a few that do not yet have enough members to claim the vanity url (what a difference!):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Asante-Africa-Foundation/144439818617

http://www.facebook.com/pages/DanvilleSycamore-Valley-Rotary/140510619569

There is a “trick” to bypass these massive urls while your Fan page is in “transition”. I’ve often used tinyurl to shrink it to a reasonable size.

In this example I took the Asante Africa url went to tinyrul.com and shrunk it to:

http://tinyurl.com/asantefb

This is much more manageable and intuitive. So as you can see it’s about brand, simplicity and knowledge. The brand – what you want the name to be. Simplicity – something easy to remember and easy on the eyes. The knowledge I’ve hopefully helped with here. I’ve read a few blogs on this subject in the past and felt like they spent a lot of time talking about things people already know or can easily learn to do and not enough on the most essential aspects of the process. I want to thank Juliette Powell for inspiring me to write this. It is my first blog entry on my Social Media oriented blog. Thanks @JuliettePowell !