For anyone to SEARCH for and find your Facebook fan page, or indeed your personal profile on Facebook s/he MUST be logged into Facebook. This implies that s/he would ALREADY have a Facebook account. And that’s the BLIND SPOT – not everyone has a Facebook account – yet, especially in Nigeria. Compared to our adoption of Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts, our use of Facebook is still relatively LOW.
Yet, most Nigerian businesses want to appeal to a large segment of society.
Is there not a danger that in the process of assuming that people can find you on Facebook by simply searching in it, you will routinely “lose” out on an opportunity to get MORE people to visit your Facebook business page?
The answer is a BIG, FAT YES.
And that’s why the lively hosts of Supersport’s 2010 South African World Cup magazine show “Harambee” routinely announce their Facebook page URL on air. Coming home, some Nigerian corporate organisations and businesses have also adopted a custom Facebook fan page username/URL to increase brand/name recognition, as well as make themselves easier to find on Facebook – especially for members of their target audience who are NOT yet converts.
The purpose of marketing is to boost awareness about you and/or your brand. You therefore need to make it easy for people who develop “interest”, to easily and quickly gain access to resources that will enable them learn MORE about you, without getting “lost” in their search for those details.
This is why it is advisable that you get yourself a “A Custom Facebook URL For Your Brand Name”. The foregoing phrase is the title of one of many articles freely available on the net that give you step-by-step guidance to create your own custom Facebook URL within a few minutes.
The steps to create your own custom username are as follows:
1. Login to your Facebook account
2. Type “http://facebook.com/username” into in your browser URL entry bar
3. You will be taken to a page with radio button options next to suggested usernames for your profile. I found it made sense to choose the one that used my first name separated from my surname with a dot.
4. Follow the instructions provided to SET the username you have chosen.
5. If you have a Facebook page attached to that profile, you will also want to set a custom username for it. Usually, a “Create a custom username for your Facebook page” link will appear below the prompt that confirms your custom profile username has been created.
6. If you do not see such a prompt, type the name of your Facebook page in the Facebook search bar and press ENTER. The icon for your page should appear before you finish typing the name – so click on it, to get taken to the page.
7. If the icon does not appear before you finish typing (be sure to check your spelling is correct), simply press ENTER and then click on the correct link/image in the Facebook search results that are returned.
8. You will be taken to a page with a drop down menu holding the names of any pages you have under your profile. Choose the name you want to set a username for, and follow the instructions provided to check availability and ultimately set it.
Summary: It’s about leveraging your name/brand effectively in all media you choose to use online. Don’t just let Facebook create an unwieldy, long and difficult-to-remember URL for your profile or business page. Make it easy for interested persons, potential customers, as well as existing clients, and even friends and relatives to find you on Facebook. Get yourself a custom Facebook URL today!
PS: This article was first published online on June 10, 2010
UPDATE: Since writing the above article in 2010, I have gone on to create custom URLs based on my domain name, leading to my Facebook (www.tayosolagbade.com/fbk) and Twitter (www.tayosolagbade.com/twit) pages.
And I do the same for EVERY client I develop a Web Marketing System for. This has proven to be even better for achieving the needed marketing impact of impressing one’s online presence in the minds of the target audience.
By making it possible to type a special URL based on your domain name, to reach your social media (and other channels), you effectively make it easier for people to REMEMBER how to get there.
…and that can translate to increased and sustained visits, with greater chances of sales leads etc!