Coming Soon: The Facebook URL

Guest post by Adrienne Levy

If you’ve been reading geek links recently, or have been on Facebook in the last 24 hours, or constantly screen your Twitter account during the day- then you have probably seen updates on something very exciting happening to Facebook starting at 12:01 am Saturday (June 13-EST).

But just in case you’ve been under a rock (or at the beach under a pier), I’m going to fill you in anyway.

The 411 from the Facebook Blog:

“From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like ‘id=592952074.’ That soon will change.

We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.”

Well- what does this really mean? And why are we so excited?

This is a big deal for candidates, elected officials and politicos because it will be easier to direct people to your Facebook profile or fan Page because its:

1.    Easy to remember
2.    Easy to search for
3.    Builds your brand image

This is big news folks. Now you can much more easily advertise your domain.

If you have Twitter you already have this great feature. For example, my Twitter URL is www.twitter.com/adriennelevy. This is simple. This is easy to remember. This is easy to tell people. And finally, Facebook is going to offer the same thing.

You may hear this referred to in tech articles such as this one and this one as the vanity URL.  If you think about it for a minute, it’s easy to realize that it is much better to have your name attached to your fan page or profile than some long list of numbers, that don’t mean anything. In a campaign your name and your message is what you want to spread. Your name is attached to your promotional materials, your press releases, your op-ed pieces, and finally, it can be on your most important social media outlets as well.

So, what will you be doing late Friday night? You know where I’ll be…logged on to Facebook, getting facebook.com/adrienne.levy.

If you have questions- leave them below and we will try to get back to you!

Written by:

Adrienne Levy (follow me on Twitter! @adriennelevy)

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