Today Facebook officially announced that they are going to make usernames available as of 12:01 am EDT Saturday, June 13th. Usernames will be available for Personal Profiles and for Fan Pages that had a minimum of 1000 fans as of 5/31/09.
What this means is that you will be able to have a URL for your Personal Profile that reads www.facebook.com/username instead of www.facebook.com/people/yourname/10 digit number that identifies you.
This will make it a lot easier to tell people how to find your Facebook profile. For those of you that have Fan Pages with a minimum of 1000 Fans, you will also be able to choose a much shorter URL for your Fan Page.
To learn more, visit these two Facebook links:
This link talks mainly about Fan Pages: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91106469821.
This link is primarily about Personal Profiles: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130.
If you have a Facebook Fan Page with less than 1000 Fans, you can always buy a domain (for about $10/year) and have it forwarded to your long Fan Page URL. I actually did this a while ago. I purchased www.socialnetworkingforbusiness.info and forwarded it to my Fan Page…check it out.
Good luck claiming your Facebook Vanity URL or Username!
Kimberly Yow
Marketing That’s Easy.com
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I got my name as the username.
You don’t need 1,000 Fans to get your own username.
Your Facebook account must be registered before June 9 as the only criteria.
Mike
Hi Mike – I’m glad to hear that you claimed your name as the “username” for your “Personal” profile.
There is also something called a “Fan Page” that you can set-up in Facebook to promote a business. In order to claim a name for a “Fan Page” there is currently a minimum requirement of 1,000 Fans.
I hope this helps clarify things for you.
Kimberly