As you may have already heard, Facebook is finally introducing vanity URLs for individuals and Fan Pages. The land rush starts at 12:01am Eastern, this Saturday morning. Given that Facebook has turned out to be a huge part of my photography business, I was quite excited to hear this, especially since I just started a Facebook page.
For those of you that don’t know what all the fuss is about, Facebook has become a hub for people and businesses, big and small. It’s an ideal place to market to your customers without them feeling like they’re being marketed to, and it’s a great place to interact with potential customers. The problem, though, is that Facebook doesn’t have very pretty URLs. Below are the full URLs to my personal profile and my photography page:
Personal Profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=731176048
Photography Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Washington-DC/Shawn-Duffy-Photography/107449143942
Given that, for many reasons, I’d actually prefer that potential customers go to my Facebook page, this presents a problem. How do I give them a URL that’s easy to remember or can fit on a business card? Well, that’s why Facebook is introducing vanity URLs. Small, easy to remember URLs for your personal profile and your business page. Sounds great, right?
But then I read a little more and saw the following:
“Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.” [link]
Hmm. Well that sucks. The limit is temporary (other Pages will be eligible on 28 June) but I want a Facebook URL now! My page has been doing well but it only has a little over 200 fans. So what can I do?
Well, if you have your own domain name and website and a tiny bit of PHP foo, you don’t even have to wait until Saturday morning!
Go to your website to the document root. The document root is the top-level directory of your site. For many people, this might be a directory called public_html, though yours may be different. Go into that directory and create another directory called facebook. To access this directory from a web browser, you would simply go to:
http://yoursite.com/facebook
Enter that directory, and create a file called index.php. In that file, put the following code, with the link to your page or profile:
<?php
header('Location: http://www.facebook.com/pages/....');
?>
So, for example, mine looks like this:
<?php
header('Location: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Washington-DC/Shawn-Duffy-Photography/107449143942');
?>
That’s it! Now my new Facebook URL is:
http://shawnduffy.com/facebook
Go ahead. Click it. It’ll take you right to my page. It’s short, easy to remember, and may actually be better than a real Facebook URL because it’s under my domain!
Just thought I’d share…
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Tags:
facebook,
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I’ve got a great mix of links today!
