by Sarah Santacroce
“Vanity is my favourite sin.” Al Pacino
This short post is not really about vanity or even less about Al Pacino. It’s about personal branding and using vanity urls for your marketing. I want to show you how to get your personalized url for your Linkedin profile as well as your professional Facebook page.
But first, let’s quickly look at why it’s important:
- it’s part of your branding
- it’s easier to remember www.facebook.com/simplicityadmins then www.facebook.com/123034980348mmm7
- it’s easier to communicate on written publications
- it just looks better !
So, let’s start with the vanity url for your Facebook page:
Before all things, you will have to get 25 “Likes” on your page. Facebook only allows “usernames”, as FB calls them, for pages with more then 25 people.
Once you have reached the magic number, you want to choose a username for your business.
Then you go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and check if the name you have chosen is available for your page. If yes, congrats, if no, choose another one.
Your username for the vanity URL must be at least five characters long and be all alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9).
A word of caution: Don't go for anything funny or cute. Play it straight. According to Facebook, "Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it."
That’s all there is to it, really.
Now let’s have a look at your Linkedin Profile:
Select the “Edit Profile” tab, scroll down a bit and next to the “Public profile” link click on “Edit”.
On the new page, scroll down a wee bit and find the box that says “ Your public profile URL” (see picture below).
You then click on “Customize your public profile URL” and choose the name you like, preferably the same that you have chosen for your Facebook page.
If you would like to see if your username is available on all other Social Media sites, have a look at Namechk.com. It tells you at one Glance which names are available for which site.
