We Got Our Facebook Vanity URL

Posted on | June 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

Well, the time came and went. 12AM on June 12 was the time to grab your Facebook vanity URL as fast as possible. In 3 minutes 200,000 names were taken. In 15 minutes it was 500,000 and now it’s in the millions. I was not so concerned with my profile name. I went after our fan pages.

Here are a few rules that Facebook set for Fan Page URLs:

1) You must have at least 1,000 fans. So for our Diamonds and Gold pages I was good to go. My Samuelson’s store page is not ready yet. Truth be told, all I have to do is cross promote the Samuelson’s page with my Diamonds page and I’ll get to 1,000 easily. But it’s not all about numbers. It’s about QUALITY of fans too – especially for a local business.

2) Generic names like “pizza” and “flowers” may not be used. Well, that was a big one because my original thought was to get facebook.com/diamonds – so that idea went out the window.

There were some other trademark rules, etc that didn’t apply to me, so at 12:01 I went right for our fan pages. I will say that Facebook did a great job and made it very easy and user friendly just like the rest of their site. The first name I chose was “Diamonds” even though I knew it was not possible. I had to do it. Of course that failed and I went to Plan B. We got facebook.com/diamondfans. We also own the URL diamondfans.net so it’s perfect. The Diamonds Fan Page and our website (in development) will match. Then I went to our “Gold” page and got www.facebook.com/goldfans. So that was taken care of.

The next URL to grab was my personal account. I thought about that one for a while. Twitter name (for now) is diamondbuyer – how about that? No good – Facebook is personal – I’ve always thought diamondbuyer was a little cheesy anyway, and Twitter URL’s can be changed (unlike Facebook). I tried just ronnie, but that was not available – I’m sure a Facebook employee grabbed that one. So I saw rsamuelson – that seemed ok. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger, and then, poof, rsamuelson was gone. So I just went for, what else, my name! God forbid the other Ron Samuelson, Huntington Beach Realtor, (who owns ronsamuelson.com) should get it. I crush him anyway and I already knocked him off first page google results. So I got facebook.com/ronsamuelson and I’m happy with it and done!

So that’s my Facebook Vanity URL story – what did you get?