Why You Should Claim Your Facebook Vanity URL

Posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 4:43 pm.

In 2009, Facebook introduced “vanity URLs”. Simply put, these are custom URLs for Facebook business pages, that allow companies to use their own names, rather than the strings of numbers automatically generated by Facebook.

So, instead of http://www.facebook.com/pages/company-name/12345678987654 you would have http://www.facebook.com/CompanyName

It’s completely free – the only requirement is that you need to be an administrator on the page to be able to edit it.

Beware – once you have set your company’s username for the URL, it cannot be changed, so make sure that you get it right!

Why set up a Facebook vanity URL

• It’s free!
• You can be more easily found in Facebook and Google searches for your name
• It’s much more memorable than the automatically-generated URL
• It’s shorter, so you can use it on your marketing materials etc.
• If you don’t claim it, someone else might!
• It helps maintain consistency across different platforms (e.g. your website, Twitter, etc.)

How to set up your Facebook vanity URL

Login to Facebook and go to your company page.

Click “Edit Page” in the top right.

Under “Basic Information” you’ll see a section where you can create a username for the page. Click this and continue as yourself.

You’ll be asked to enter your chosen username and check availability. You’ll see this window:

Click “Confirm”, and voilà, you have your vanity URL!

You can then direct visitors to this URL through your website or any other means.

Further reading:

How to Integrate Facebook into Your Website

Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Fan-Gate

Facebook Pages for Business