Stop Being a Number – User Friendly Vanity URLs Coming Soon on Facebook

While playing around on a poster for a client to promote their Facebook page, we are often caught in the issue of what to print on it. Take WAT Media’s fan page for instance – it is www.facebook.com/pages/WAT/14695170337. Now even if we somehow manage to print it somewhere, I guess hardly anyone would remember it enough to go find it on Facebook by typing such a URL. Things get worse for individual profiles like ours – basically on Facebook we are just numbers.

But there is hope for us now. A good 3 months after it initially tested it out, Facebook now seems to be looking at providing vanity URLs to its users. Which means profiles and most like even pages can get vanity URLs – say Facebook.com/Maneesh (I’d like that a lot, though I know eight others who would like to beat me to it). And something tells me this is going to be a fiercely contested and highly spirited affair when Facebook opens it doors – 200 million people is huge and that leaves getting a generic name on Facebook a tricky affair.

There will be some limits though on the kind of Vanity URL that you can get. According to Techcrunch – The Landrush rules will prohibit trademark infringement and lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms. So don’t bother trying to latch on to Facebook.com/Sex (we all know the story of sex.com right?).

Why is this important, you ask?

Online profiles have increasingly become their social touch points for a lot people, like MySpace for bands and Twitter for power web users. You can say that Facebook has been at fault for not giving this to us till now, but I think that this is the best time to do it! Facebook has been edging out other networks like MySpace and Orkut and has been expanding exponentially!

Digital marketers should certianly take note of this. There are some who already think this will be good for SEO, and that can be attributed to the way Google introduced Google profiles recently and started indexing them. I have already written previously on how Social Media Platforms can be the next big Media Assets, and it would be good to have a Facebook.com/Rockmusic instead of a Facebook.com/pages/i-love-kindergarten-rock-music/somerandomnumber for your online property. For Facebook, this might also help them in taking themselves out of Facebook as they have been planning better.

Who knows, facebook might as well be planning to make us pay for vanity URLs of our choice! And this can also lead to cybersquatting in Facebook with users holding on to celeb names. Let us know what you think in the comments.