How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page
In addition to “Friends help Friends: Get more than 100 fans for your Facebook Fan page” I got some questions about how to get the special url up and running. Thus, a quick how-to.
Step 1: Plan your page
Since today Facebook Fan pages can have vanity urls too. Meaning instead of the ugly
http://www.facebook.com/pages/the-long-name-you-chose/the-id-facebook-gave-you
you could have:
http://www.facebook.com/yourchoiceofname
In order to set the Facebook vanity url for your fan page, there are several things which need to be in place first.
- You need to be admin of the page in question
- It seems you also may need a verified account
- You need to know which name you want for that page. Because once you have set it, you can never change it.
Facebook lists the following restrictions:
-
- Create a username that is as close as possible to your public figure or business name (e.g. AshtonKutcher, PizzaHut).
- If you own the rights to a given name, make it your username so that others cannot obtain it.
- Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.”).
- Choose a username you will be happy with for the long term. Usernames are not transferable.
- Your username must adhere to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
Step 2: Choose your vanity url
For choosing your pages url, visit http://www.facebook.com/username/. You will see something similar to this:
This means, that I have set my personal username and in the bottom you do find the “Set username for your pages”. Click on this and you will see a new selection:Â 
Now, if my page for the Global Business Women had enough fans, I could now choose to enter a name for them and show you the rest. ;)
Step 3: Setting the URL
I will follow with more information once I have a page over 100 fans to check how this goes ;)
Further information from the help entry from Facebook:
- Infringement:
If you wish to report that someone’s username infringes your rights, please fill out our username infringement form. The form is located here.- I am an authorized representative for a public figure, brand or business and/or hold the rights to a trademark name. My username was claimed by another user. What can I do?
If you wish to report that someone’s username infringes your rights, please fill out our username IP infringement form.- What is the process to request removal of an unauthorized Page of a public figure, brand or business?
If you wish to report that someone’s username infringes your rights, all you need to do is fill out our username IP infringement form here.- Will usernames such as “flowers” or “pizza” ever be available for Facebook Pages? Can I sign up on a waiting list?
At this time, generic words are not available as usernames. Facebook encourages all users and Page administrators to create a username that closely matches the true identity of their name or business.
Tags: facebook, facebook fan pages
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Thanks for the information! I was really wondering that how they people are getting such url and i am very confused, Finally got time to do research on that and your article is really useful for me
Cheers man Keep it up
Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for this. Heaven forbid I should actually find this info easily on Facebook. Thanks to you, I’ve now got EchoesFans.
how come it says “Aziphone is not eligible for a username at this time. In the future, Aziphone will be able to set a username.”
thanks so so much!!! you’ve just got another internet stalker!! LOL.
Thanks for the article, i was able to setup a vanity username for my fanpage within seconds.
This totally saved me! It would have taken me quite a bit of wasted time to find where this was!
Thanks so much!!!
I found the same problem. why cant i set a username for my fanpage yet? why do i have to wait for the future?
Hi Nicole, I followed your steps to get our vanity name, but it gave the name to our personal (administrator’s) page, not to our fan page. I know there is no fix for this, but for others, do you know how you can avoid this?
I also had the same thing happen to me. The username ended up being for my personal page. How do I create a unique username URL for our business fan page?
Thank you so much for this tutorial! It was so helpful in creating a username for my fan page on facebook!
SWEEEEEEEEET! FASTEST AND BEST INFO I CAN GET ONLINE! Followed your instructions in 5 seconds flat!
Great post,
I was trying to figure out how to set up vanity urls for a facebook page i made but couldn’t figure it out, this guide helped a ton
I read somewhere that your page needs to have at least 25 fans to be eligible for a custom username.
this seems to work for my personal page…how do I set this up for my business fan page?
THANK YOU! I emailed facebook and they said this doesn’t exist… uh, how come everyone has one? So, I Googled it and your blog came right up. Thanks so much!!
Agree, too bad Facebook couldn’t make this easier to understand. (or at least train their own people!)
I enjoyed your explanation of how to get a vanity name.I had wondered how to do this. I also signed up to help others get to 100 and me too. thanks a bunch.
This is awesome! Thank you so much.
[…] sein Profil sowie auch für seine Seiten einrichten. In einem etwas älteren Beitrag erklärt Nicole, wie man diese Vantiy URL aktivieren kann.Im Internet gibt es zahlreiche Webservices, mit welchen […]
Why does it say I am not eligible to set a username, but in the future I will be? I know you answered this many times
[…] Page and settings links, then searching through Facebook’s help system, it ultimately took a Google search to figure out how easy it is to do this.  Hopefully I’ll save you the 15 minutes of my life […]
thank you!! so helpful!
Thank you for the very clear directions you provided in this article. I set my Vanity URL in 2 minutes after reading! Really!
I have a Facebook fan page and tried to create a vanity url for it following the url in this post. it came back saying I need a profile before using this feature. Why do I need a profile page to set up the vanity url for my fan page and how do I go about setting up a profile for the business?
Thanks! (ps. have to have at least 25 fans on a Fan page to be able to set a vanity URL).
Thanks… worked like a charm!
Thanks for the helpful post! I got nailed with the “less than 25 members” thing too, but that’s fine, I’ll just wait an hour :-)
Thanks again!
Adam
I’ve been having the same issue for a while, can’t setup a vanity URL for a business fan page even though we have more than 25 fans. Can’t find any information on how to do this either. Anyone have contact info for facebook?
Great stuff, really easy to follow.
Keep the tips coming.
cheers
I was also looking everywhere on how to set up this, very easy to follow guide. Thank you. I guess I just have to wait for a few more fans before I can add my businesses page.
Thank you. Your post helped me to figure out how to do it. Thanks again!
I have a page with over 100 likes. The name i requested is not taken by anyone else yet Facebook is telling me that it is unavailable
This is probably because you are trying to use a name which is forbidden, like a too generic name.
[…] a vanity URL for your page. Is this going to make or break your page? No. But it looks a heck of a lot better […]
Thank you for this very helpful blog. I was going nuts trying to find where to do this. I went nuts getting 25 fans, which is one of the requirements, then could not find the place where to customize my fanpage the url.
Thanks a lot! This is a valuable information!
thanks for the info Nicole !
Thanks for this tutorial! I always thought I needed 200 fans/likes for my vanity url. Then, I just found out we need 25…so, goggled you and easier and quickly made my vanity url: http://www.facebook.com/americanmuslimmom Yay! :-)
Is it possible to get a friendly URL for a group (not a fan page)? I am an admin of a group and we would like to have a URL but I cannot find any info anywhere!!
Thanks so much.
sorry no, only for the page right now.
Thank you so much. This was very helpful.
This was so helpful as I just grabbed one for the business I work for – Horizon Equipment.
I opted for the uppercase wording, but it did take me time to decide if I wanted HorizonEquipment or horizonequipment. Hope my decision was wise!
I grabbed one for my name too back in the day. Didn’t have to wait long for that one, it was only the business page I had to wait on and get enough LIKES.
Thanks again!!
I am confused still after reading all these posts – here is what I did – i created a personal page and then created a local business page. I see in my personal page account settings that i have a username – must have tried to set that when I created it.
I have no friends on my personal page – but when I goto facebook.com/myusername it does in fact show my personal fb page. Great – but what I really want is to get my businsess page to have a vanity (will be different than my personal one). I have 28 LIKES to my business page – I went to facebook.com/username and all I get is the option to change my personal username – I logged into personal page went to .com/username and then select business page – dont see anything allowing me to set my vanity url for business – I assume I dont need 25 friends as well do I?
This is exactly what I was looking for. It’s a bit embarrassing when my online marketing clients ask how to get their fb name to be just their business name. Thank you Nicole!
Thanks for the info. Do you know if it is better from an SEO point of view to use an underscore between two words, or to have no space at all?
eg. yellow_boots or yellowboots
Cheers in advance
you cannot have either in the url :)
Unfortunately didn’t work for me. You really have to have verified account to create the username (you have mentioned that it might be required in the post). I guess I will keep the original url /page/23432432 for now. ;o)
I went ahead and used my cell number to verify it thinking after it was verified I’d take it right back off like I did my personal page… but I can’t seem to find a way to take it back off. Any idea how to do it? Thanks in advance!
[…] http://crueltobekind.org/how-to-set-up-the-vanity-url-for-your-facebook-fan-page-627 Share this article: […]
Nic… informative
Thanks a lot for this post. I could never find this info on FB of course. Great post which I will definitely be sharing with my social circle!
Thanks!
Great post! So easy…
Thanks for finally useful information! so I can set up my fan page name!
[…] also followed another tutorial and created my own vanity Facebook URL: http://www.facebook.com/fitnesscheerleader. (Can you […]
Well, i have tried and the sistem tell me that its in use, but no one is using the name.
i will try later
thanks
Gaf
thank dude. nice information about facebook page name
Thanks Nicole for this piece of information. We were stuck with alphanumeric numbers in the business page. Your information helped us out and we now have the desired page http://www.facebook.com/ofoodies
Thanks for info. Is it possible to create a short name of my page with 4 characters? When I typed the name yaga I was told that the names with 5 and more characters are required only.
no looks like there is a minimum. how about making it yaga.ru instead?
this is not working anymore
I lost my fanpage with 500+ fans due to your article. its so bad, I should not have trusted you
it is easy to try to blame somebody, but there is no possibility how you can loose your fan page when you try to set your username. you can do the wrong name for a status, you can do wrong names etc etc, but you cannot loose your fanpage by setting a username.
what ever you did, it is not because of this instruction.
there is currently though running a virus around, stripping you of your admin rights to your pages when you click on the links of some spammy content like “look who visited your profile” or “see what i have for you” and alike.
Thanks, couldnt find the setting to do this
I know this sounds dramatic but I am on the brink of tears! Not only am I trying to obtain a vanity url but I am also trying to publish my business page, despite me having 29 likes, all that shows up on my business page is that damn brief case and nothing else. What’s strange is, my actual website says I have 9 likes; when I click onto my A Rox Jewelry link from my personal page (the where I’m employed link) it takes me to the A Rox page (showing only the brief case) and that I have 14 friends who like my page on the right hand side and 29 likes on the left hand side… When I switch from my personal page to my business page as the admin, it shows I only have 7 likes. What on earth am I missing?! I cannot believe such a simple task has stolen so much of my time and made me feel like a total numskull in the process! What am I missing?
Hi Ashley, you actually have a community page there, not a real fan page. That is indeed a big hassle and not really something to take care of easily. I will try to write up something about it and ping you then.
i am interested in hearing about the importance of choosing a certain FB vanity url if the one that exactly matches your business name is not available.. for seo purposes does it matter if you just ad ‘biz’ to the end of the name? Will it still come up on FB when searching after the page is published?
if your name is not available, you should make it something which is consistent with your brand and then you should be fine. hth
So you have to have 100 “likes” before you can change the URL? Is that still true?
no it is 25, it was 100. but once you have set it, you cannot change it again.
Thank you!
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page Once you get 25 “Likes†on your Facebook Page, you need to go out and grab a custom URL for your Facebook Page. Your URL will be easier to remember, branded to your company, and much shorter! Nicole Simone of Cruel to Be Kind shows you how. […]
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page […]
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page ?Once you get 25 “Likes†on your Facebook Page, you need to go out and grab a custom URL for your Facebook Page. Your URL will be easier to remember, branded to your company, and much shorter! Nicole Simone of Cruel to Be Kind shows you how. […]
[…] – Establece una buena URL […]
Thank you for this explanation. I found it very helpful.
Hi There,
is there any buddy knows that, once the vanity URL is set, how to remove/update the old URL in the google.
I have a vanity URL set as MindzGroup Technologies on Facebook
But, when I search in google it shows the old URL in the results. Try searching “mindzgroup facebook†in google to get the idea. You should be getting Facebook page’s URL for MindzGroup in 4-5 position on the first page itself.
also please ignore my previous comment and delete it, as it was not clearly telling my thoughts.
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page […]
Hi,
If I set up a vanity url for my facebook page, does this change the name at the top of my page? The fact that Facebook calls this the “username” makes me nervous…
Also, will people still be able to find us using our original url?
Thanks!
Yes it will change the URL but if people still use the old url, it will redirect automatically to your new one, you do not need to do anything.
Thanks for this Nicole. Much appreciated.
Hello, I am having trouble getting my URL. I know what process to follow and have been able to verify for mobile contact with facebook but when I try to verify for the URL, it doesn’t send a text, eventhough it did for the mobile verification. I have 31 fans. I’m wondering if facebook doesn’t count the fans if a notification to my email was not sent when they joined, as I did not receive a notification from more than half of them. Any advice would be appreciated.
Sandra, there should be no mobile verification with this?
Thank you so much for the useful information. I was able to set up the URL ofr my fan page, now I’m trying to figure something else out. I am trying to set up my website and it says in order to link my fan page to my site I need to enter my facebook fan page ID. It says to go to my fan page, click on the fan page logo in the upper left side, dopy the fan page ID from the address bar (just the number). The problem is there is no number, it just has http://www.facebook.com/#!/livingthefrugalway. What am I doing wrong…where is the number?
Christina, if you use this one here:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/ you should be able to use your name itself.
Your Id should be 120594214696686 if I can see that correctly, but just try the normal widget as I linked above. :)
Thanks for the awesome and quick tutorial!!
You wouldn’t happen to also know why my vanity url is not showing when I’m logged out of Facebook, or not showing for some of my friends? It just reloads their own profile page, or the homepage of Facebook (and isn’t in the search!)
It’s http://www.facebook.com/sarawildephotography
Sara is it possible that you actually did link your own personal profile instead of your fan page for this?
Hi,
I’ve got over 25 fans and have set up the URL http://www.facebook.com/onedayinwindmillhill
but I can’t work out why people have to be logged in to see it. For other fan pages you don’t have to be logged in.
Thanks,
Emily
Thanks for the great advice (and the cheeky plug at the end). I’ve now been able to set up my fb URL as herbdoctorimages :D
Thanks for the information! I was really wondering that how they people are getting such url and i am very confused, Finally got time to do research on that and your article is really useful for me
Cheers man Keep it up !!!
I wonder if you can help me. I need to change the custon url for my page (already fixed) and to take the custom url of our facebook profiel. This is possible?
Thanks
You cannot transfer of change the url.
Hi, please help! I think I am going slightly mad with this Facebook vanity url thing!!! I have a business page vintage jewel box and I have 26 likes so I have gone to the set up user name page and in the ‘pages’ drop down menu there were 3 choices ‘vintage jewel box’, ‘app profiles’, and my page with its full url ‘www.facebook.com/pages/Vintage-Jewel-Box/204586942913024’. I selected the page with its full url thinking that is the one I want the vanity name for. It was available but now I have a new page with none of my content on it..I am now thinking rather late that I should have selected ‘vintage jewel box’ Am I right and is there anything I can do about it?? Thanks to anyone who can help me unravel this.
Thanks for this guide. I know alot of people that have this problem, I will direct them here.
Kim – right now your page is still swohing the id=?number, so you might try walking through the instructions again.
To echo what John said, Heaven forbid I should actually find this info easily on Facebook… great info., very helpful!
You rock, thanks!
Thanks for this info…it worked for me!
[…] also followed another tutorial and created my own vanity Facebook URL: http://www.facebook.com/fitnesscheerleader. (Can you […]
You can also use redirected subdomains to get a vanity URL. I setup fb.brandingarc.com because it was far easier to remember.
[…] If you don’t have one already, set up your Facebook fan page. You can follow this guide and watch the video below for the mechanics of it. Don’t stress on getting everything just right at the moment, we’ll cover some of the latest and greatest trends in making your profile look and be the best in coming lessons, just get your page up and reserve your Facebook url. […]
Thanks for sharing these info, i do always forget the URL to set the name of my facebook-pages.
I have inherited a business page and when I try to make my vanity URL it tells me that in order to access this page, I need to from using Facebook as my page to using Facebook as myself. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Thanks for any help you can give me
Jodi: you need to be logged in with your normal personal profile in order to access the menue where you can set your vanity url.
It is possible that when you log in that you are ‘just’ a business page (that is the old setup) and have no real personal profile. Go in with your normal user of Jodi, make sure that you yourself have set a name for yourself first (like mine: facebook.com/nicole.simon) before moving on. That is error number one of many. Once you have one for your profile, be careful and move on for your business page. hth
wow. i was too worried about my long facebook fanpage id. but from right now i can get a short url. thank you for your useful post.
Fantastic website. Plenty of helpful information here. I am sending it to a few buddies ans also sharing in delicious. And of course, thank you to your effort!
thanks. got it for the other page
I have tried to set up this vanity url and it keeps telling me that only Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.â€)
all i am putting is facebook.com/swflnaturally (where am I going wrong?
Looks like you succeeded in that. Sometimes there is a space at the end when you try to setup the name.
Hi, I hope someone can help :)
If I were to change the URL of my page does it also change the page name and the name that I post with – does that make sense?
Thanks.
Dianne it does. The URL only is for display and your browser in the address bar. What you ‘post with’ aka what is seen inside of Facebook stays as it is. hth
Hey,
Thanks a lot for the very clear information,
Tamir
i successfully changed the url link to my bands page, but as a result the page wont load for anyone that clicks on it and the url bar still contains the old link! – the page only loads when a direct link to the new url is followed, anyone got any tips or contact info for facebook? :) cheers!
Aaron, that should be a temporary glitch, nothing more. :)
Hi Nicole I’ve a question about my fan page. I am applying for a username, the name is available, and when I click confirm, it gives me an error message “There was an unexpected error. Please try again late”,
what does that mean? Does it have anything to do with the setting on the FB page?
Thanks
thx info :)
Hi there,
Hoping someone can help me….
I have made an error while setting up my Facebook page – it wasn’t clear that there was a separate option for selecting vanity names for pages created for a business when I went to the update section of my account, so instead, I accidentally set my personal page vanity URL as the one I intended to name as my business page URL. There appears to be no way to swap the URL back without losing my vanity URL – which is now showing up as unavailable as its been taken by my personal account! I am not sure what to do now – I intended to use the personal account, and business page separately, which I wanted to be able to log into from the one interface. Upon reading other blogs, it appears that if I migrate the personal account to the business URL this will make the vanity URL available for the business page, but I will then lose any access I had to the linked personal account.Â
Please advise what I can do, if there is a way, to change my personal vanity URL to my business page URL, and then rename my personal account to my own name, which I should have done in the first place!
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity Url For Your Facebook Fan Page Once you get 25 “Likes†on your Facebook Page, you need to go out and grab a custom URL for your Facebook Page. Your URL will be easier to remember, branded to your company, and much shorter! Nicole Simone of Cruel to Be Kind shows you how. […]
[…] How To Set Up The Vanity URL For Your Fan Page | Cruel To Be Kind […]
Hey please need ur help i have already changed my url vanity, but when someone click it automatically directed to his personal facebook.