My vanity on Facebook

On Friday, at a time when most people are usually out partying and looking forward to a doner kebab whilst stumbling home, Facebook decided to release it’s new vanity URLs for people to snap up and boy were they snapped up. According to Mashable, 5555 usernames were being registered every second at it’s highest point.

I would have been awake at 5am to nab my own username but due to heavy hayfever and a plethora of tablets that do nothing except make me drowsy, I slept right through until Saturday afternoon. Thankfully though, it seems my last name is relatively unique and I’m now the proud owner of facebook.com/philhancox. Along with twitter.com/philhancox and, of course, my own domain philhancox.co.uk, are there any more vanity URLs I should be snapping up?

Naturally a few funny and interesting Facebook usernames have also been registered. One of my favourites is facebook.com/defaults.aspx (of course, Facebook is primarily written in PHP but meh, it’s still genius) or facebook.com/index. I also quite like the mirror username facebook.com/moc.koobecaf and I’m sure with another 3 million or so vanity URLs registered, there will be another good few funny ones out there.

At the moment though I chose my vanity URL for the one reason they’re important: branding. With a Facebook URL, people and businesses (and those where the two are one and the same) can have their own shorter, attractive and more trustworthy Facebook brands instead of facebook.com/pages/blah/blah-blah-blah/01234567890 it can be facebook.com/business. Nice.

Facebook is realising Twitter is becoming a powerful tool that businesses are using to converse with their customers, and Facebook wants in on the action. Instead of businesses putting up signs saying follow us on twitter.com/business, they want them putting up signs saying check us out on facebook.com/business and vanity URLs are one step further at achieving this mission. We’ll see if vanity URLs help Facebook become a larger slice of the branding and social media strategy for businesses wanting to get closer to their customer.

Did you get your vanity URL? Friend me on facebook.com/philhancox and don’t forget to follow me at twitter.com/philhancox.