another sam chan: the student blogger

One of the stupidest things about Facebook back in the day was how hard it was to share your own Facebook with others you meet in real life. ‘Just look up Sam Chan’ doesn’t go very far when you’ve got an entire Facebook group consisting of people with the same name as you. Or, you can go the ICQ route and memorize the generic number that Facebook gave you when you first signed up. This changed last June when Facebook finally let everyone have their own URL and the masses scrambled to grab their own name. However, things were less clear for fan Pages. I recently tried to set a vanity url for my own ‘fan’ page and found it amazingly difficult to find proper instructions on how to do so. Thus, here is my own. If you haven’t set your own URL for your normal Facebook page, the instructions are almost identical and will only take a minute to do. Trust me, you don’t want to be www.facebook.com/samchan20495 5 years from now. So here it is:

1. Make sure your Fan Page has at least 25 fans. (Those looking to get an URL for their own personal page can ignore this step).

2. Go to www.facebook.com/username.

3. Click on “Set a Username for your Pages” (for Personal pages, click on the link above that line)

4. Select the page you want to add a vanity URL to.

5. Test out your URL to make sure its available, then hit submit and you’re done!

In a world where online branding is becoming increasingly important, small things like this can make the difference, especially if you’re a budding company. It is extremely disappointing when it is SO easy to give your company that extra bit of credibility, yet over 30% of the top Facebook pages right now don’t even have one.