Pretty Facebook URLs: Vanity or Necessity?

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Facebook has rocked the social media world upside down over the past couple months by offering vanity URLs.  Facebook URLs are notoriously long and ugly and not suitable for use as a destination URL.

At first glance, it was exciting news for fan page owners, until they realized that they had to have at least 1,000 members already to qualify.  Then something exciting happened, Facebook opened it up a month later to smaller fan pages as well.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Only pages with 100 or more fans.

For many businesses with Facebook fan pages, they felt betrayed a second time.

But what’s the big deal?  Facebook’s hype blurred the line between technology and strategy. There is nothing magical about a vanity URL that you can’t accomplish with a domain name. If your strategy includes using a Facebook page as a destination link, you can do this with a subdomain and a redirect.

For example, I set up http://facebook.homedigz.com for the HOMEdigz.com fan page.  Ironically, because there were over 100 fans, I also was able to secure http://facebook.com/HOMEdigz from Facebook.  Both work equally fine – tomato vs tomahto.

Here’s a secret – it’s easier than you think to do this yourself.  To walk you through it, I’ll show you how I set up a subdomain with a redirect to make it easier to link to Facebook’s Networked Blog application for Rooms That Work LLC’s “Your home, only better.” blog.

First, I went to the Contol Panel for the Rooms That Work website.  Under “Domains” I clicked on “subdomains“ and set up a subdomain for facebook.  For example:

Next I entered “facebook” in the subdomain box, and clicked “create”.

Voila!

Next I set up the redirect by copy and pasting the looooong Facebook URL, then clicked “save.”

There you have it.

Care to try it out?  Go to http://facebook.roomsthatwork.com and see where you end up.

As I mentioned before, be careful not to confuse the technology with the strategy.  This is not limited to Facebook applications.  If you have various applications at different places online, you can use subdomains to simplify your links.

So don’t get caught up in the pretty URL hype.  You have everything you need to help your customers navigate with ease with your domain name.  It’s all about how you use what you already have.  Remember, technology is a facilitator, not the objective.