How to claim your Facebook Page vanity URL?

Updated October 2011. Up until very recent, if you’ve been using Facebook Page to promote your

business, you would have noticed the lengthy combination of numbers, words and forward slashes

that make up the address for that Page. Amongst other things, you were required to have 25 likes in

order to claim your vanity URL. Well, no more! You no longer need 25 Likes to get your custom

page vanity URL.

Facebook now offers Page owners (or ‘admins’) the ability to easily create what has become known as

a ‘vanity URL’, no need to have 25 Likes. Essentially, it’s creating a username for a particular Page

that will work as part of its URL. So if, for example, your business name is ‘Sprockets’,

"facebook.com/pages/sprockets/285846120769129" gets nicely shortened to

"facebook.com/sprockets".

Ah, much better–and easier for your visitors to remember, too. You can even put your Facebook Page

vanity URL on a business card now!

Need to know

Before you get started creating a vanity URL for your Facebook Page, here are a few quick things you

need to know:

You must be an admin for the Page you’re attempting to give a vanity URL. You can’t transfer ownership to another party. Once you’ve set a username for your Facebook Page—thereby creating its vanity URL—it

cannot be changed. So take some time to think about what name would be ideal for your Page.

Facebook Page vanity URLs may only consist of letters, numbers and periods. So no spaces or symbols are allowed.

Okay, let’s get you started.

1. Go to Facebook’s username page To begin the process of creating your very own vanity URL on Facebook, you’ll need to log into your

account and access Facebook’s username page. You can find it

here: facebook.com/username (http://www.facebook.com/username/), and it’ll look like this:

Of course, where mine says “aliciaevaz” yours will say whatever your Facebook profile username is.

2. Select your Facebook Page

From the ‘Page Name’ drop-down, select the Page for which you wish to create a vanity URL. Once

one is selected, a text box will appear to the right.

Since a vanity URL on Facebook is essentially a unique username you create for a particular Page, the

text box that appears will prompt you to enter a desired username. Go right ahead and then click the

blue ‘Check Availability’ button. The form will let you know if your username (in other words, Facebook

Page vanity URL) is available for you to claim.

3. Success! You’re all done!

If the username you’ve entered is available for you to claim and use on Facebook, you’ll see a

confirmation message. I completed the process creating a Facebook Page vanity URL for my Socially

Speaking with Alicia Vaz identity and here’s what my confirmation page looked like:

Excitedly click the blue ‘okay’ button and start directing visitors to your Facebook Page via a

thoughtful URL.

(As opposed to a bunch of jumbled letters and numbers. Yuck.)