At midnight eastern June 12th, Facebook opened the doors for people to reserve their usernames as vanity Facebook URLs (I’m www.Facebook.com/AndreaStenberg). There was a fully of activity at midnight and many experts were amazed that Facebook didn’t crash as people rushed to reserve their own names.
Meanwhile, many people rushed to reserve vanity URLs for their Fan or Business pages on Facebook. According to Facebook rules, your Fan page had to have been created prior to May 31st and had to have at least 1,000 fans by that date.
If you didn’t meet that criteria, you were shut out. But not permanently. Starting midnight eastern Saturday (12:01 Sunday June 28th) everyone with a Facebook Fan Page can set a vanity URL.
Since you can only have 5,000 personal friends but unlimited numbers of fans, creating a page for your business makes sense.
Celebrities have Fan pages branded with their names – www.Facebook.com/JaneDoe. For example: www.facebook.com/AshtonKutcher
Now you don’t have to be a Hollywood celebrity to brand your Fan page around your name. Authors, consultants or anyone who is a leader in their field and is branding themselves around their name could use their name as their vanity URL.
However, if you already used www.Facebook.com/JaneDoe for your personal page, you can’t use it for your fan page as well. And you can’t change your personal user name so you’ll have to come up with another option. I suppose you could use www.Facebook.com/Jane.Doe, however I think that might cause confusion.
On the other hand, if you have a business name, you can use that. www.facebook.com/PizzaHut
Authors can create pages around the title of their book. www.facebook.com/CrushIt
If you weren’t able to reserve your vanity URL for your Facebook Fan Page, set your alarm clock for midnight Saturday. And spend some time between now and then deciding what your URL should be, because you can’t change it later.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Have you seen some examples of great Facebook Fan Pages? How are small businesses using Fan Pages? Leave a comment and share your thoughts or the links to great pages.
