Urgent: Grab Your Name URL on Facebook at Midnight

Posted on 12. Jun, 2009 by Jay OHare in Marketing

This is IMPORTANT and you need to know about it RIGHT AWAY.

Tonight Facebook is staging one of the biggest virtual land grabs ever - the rush to claim your own name on Facebook.com.

You’ve heard of Internet Marketers claiming that the surge of traffic crashed their servers?

Well tonight there will be a server rush that has rarely, if ever, been duplicated on the Net. And you NEED to be part of it.

Right now if you want to send someone to your profile, you have to figure out a URL that looks something like this:

www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/585946540
(That’s an inactive URL, BTW, so don’t click it.)

But wouldn’t you rather own www.facebook.com/yourname?

And this becomes even MORE important for Facebook Fan Pages (not your regular friend profiles, the pages you can set up to promote your business.) Can you imagine how devastating it would be to have someone else own your company name in Facebook?

In the past, it was easy to own your own name on Facebook, all you had to do was to spend a large amount with Facebook (think $50,000+ per month) or be a huge celebrity, and it was yours.

But starting tonight at midnight Eastern US time (that would be 9:00pm Pacific time) you can claim your name as a facebook URL. Plus, you can claim names for your business pagestoo.

But here’s the catch – it’s first come, first serve. Imagine a couple of hundred MILLION people all try to grab their name at the same time, and there will be some interesting server shenanigans occuring.

Here’s what to do.

Tonight at midnight US Eastern time, login to Facebook then go to http://www.facebook.com/username

You will see a form that will give you several suggested usernames, and the ability to choose your own. Either choose one of the names suggested or type in your own.

Repeat this process for any Facebook Fan Pages you administer, though there are three catches: first, your page must have over 1000 fans prior to May 31st 2009, you can’t claim something generic like travel or insurance, and you can’t claim someone else’s trademark.

In fact, if you have a registered trademark, I suggest you go to
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
right now to prevent others from grabbing your name.

If someone else has already has your name, get creative - add a period, or a dash, shorten it, lengthen it, or slap a number in there somewhere.

That’s the drill. I’ll be there at midnight, and I suggest you be there too.

Related posts:

1. Facebook PlaceHolder