Facebook personal (or vanity) URL’s are coming soon! Facebook vanity URL is a more personal Facebook web address than the current one they offer. At the moment some priviledged (read=famous) Facebook users are already enjoying their own vanity url’s. Some good examples are the president of the United States, Microsoft, the musician Sting and the most famous TV-cartoon Simpsons.
Here is a top 10 list of famous Facebook users with their own names (not in any particular ranking order):
- http://www.facebook.com/u2
- http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
- http://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfreyshow
- http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft
- http://www.facebook.com/sting
- http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg (duh…)
- http://www.facebook.com/coldplay
- http://www.facebook.com/eBay
- http://www.facebook.com/redcross
- http://www.facebook.com/TheSimpsons
Luckily for the rest of us Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim their personal, or vanity URL pointing to their profile page. For instance at the moment www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697888240 is me, but next week it could be something like www.facebook.com/KrisOlin, which would be much easier to remember and use. No to mention the advantages for SEO purposes for famous people and companies. Google, buy the way, does not have their own Facebook URL. Hmmm? Facebook has recently asked their users if they would pay for a vanity URL. The results are not yet published, so at the moment we don’t know if they plan on charging for them or not. In all likelihood personal names will be free, but busines names might incur a cost; possibly much the same way as paying for your domain name, for which you pay a yearly fee to the registry. This is the official, most recent comment from Facebook about the matter:
“Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs. The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future.”
Well, the future seems to be now, since they have plans to make an official announcement no later than next week. The rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms and phrases. But for the most part, users should be able to grab a name that they want.
Vanity URL’s have proven to be a very powerful tool on other social networking sites such as MySpace and Twitter. It’s not just that users like them but it makes telling people your online profile name easier as well. People have also long used MySpace URL’s as their main online identity, even instead of a website. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. It’s no wonder Facebook wants to enter this game now.
When the personal URL’s are available, you can with get more instructions from the horse’s mouth: http://www.facebook.com/help.php
Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
Msc (marketing)
http://twitter.com/KrisOlin (in the meantime)
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.
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