Vanity URL for Your Facebook Page Without the minimum Fans

If you’re just starting to explore facebook as a platform for marketing, you will probably won’t have 1000/25 (whatever the number is now) fans just yet. Facebook imposed a rule on vanity URLs (http://www.facebook.com/<yourbusinessname>) that pages need to have a minimum number of followers before being allowed to customize their vanity URL. More on that on this page

However, with the help of Facebook’s recently released tool to migrate your profile pages to fan pages, we can actually work around this limitation. These are the steps I took:

1. Sign up for a new account at http://facebook.com (or use one of your extra ones that you don’t use very much and haven’t set a vanity URL for yet)

2. Add some friends (yourself perhaps?), update your profile, picture, all of the basics especially verifying your email address.

3. Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to set your vanity URL. Before you can do this, you will need to verify your account via SMS. Don’t know of a work around for for this step though. Also, you can only use a phone number once.This is what you should be seeing:

Before you can set your username, you need to verify your account.

If you have a mobile phone that can receive SMS messages, you can verify via mobile phone. If not, please try to register your username at a later time.

4. Once you put in your verification code, you’ll be able to choose a vanity URL. This should be your desired business page’s vanity URL. IMPORTANT: you can only set this once so choose carefully!

5. Once you find one that’s not taken and confirm your selection, you can proceed to the migration tool to migrate your profile to a fan page. This page will allow you to classify the type of page/business you want to be classified under. Remember to agree to the terms and conditions and click on “Get Started”.

6. Welcome to your new brand page complete with vanity url!

The great thing about setting your page up like this is that the page is an account in itself. When you login to facebook with the email you first used to sign up, you’ll be taken straight to the page admin.

I know i should have taken screenshots but i didn’t think it would actually work :p Try it out now before facebook catches on 🙂