How Social Media Vanity URLs Impact Businesses

Social media sites are used as a medium by companies and organizations to connect with their audience all across the world irrespective of age, gender, and location. Social websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others make it even simpler for businesses to become an integral part of their lives. This gives the businesses an opportunity to interact with its audience and get firsthand review of its products and services. It also allows businesses to get a glimpse into the lives of their audience and use this data to direct its marketing and sales strategies.

Social media is increasingly becoming important for businesses to develop a professional network and at the same time, forge personal relations with customers.

What is Vanity URL?

A vanity URL is a type of custom or descriptive URL, used for marketing purposes in place of traditional longer URLs which are not easy to remember. Vanity URL helps the user transform long links into a shorter one which can be used for marketing campaigns or for advertising on traditional media.

By using a vanity URL on social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, it becomes even more likely that your company or product will show in the SERPs and have a better visual impact.

Some of the factors that must be considered while creating username for the social media profiles include:

• Use your real name or business name to create username with the use of alphanumeric characters or a period
• Think carefully before creating your username and check spelling as you cannot change the username afterwards.

Steps for creating Vanity URL for social media sites:

Facebook

If you have created a page on the Facebook, just follow these directions to create a vanity URL:

You can change your username at http://www.facebook.com/username.

Otherwise, you can go to the “About” tab of your page where you will see “Page Info”. Earlier this option was under Settings. If you have already created a vanity URL for your page, there will be an option to change it. However, you need to remember that you can change your vanity URL just once. If you want to change the name of your page, you can do it from “About” tab only. Here is the screenshot to make you understand better:

Note: It will show some suggestions if the name you select has been taken up by any other user; if the name is unique, it will get changed.

Terms and conditions

• Your profile should be at least 30 days old.
• You must have 25 likes to claim your vanity URL.
• Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.”).

LinkedIn

In case of LinkedIn, your username is displayed under your profile photo and it can be changed in a simple manner. The entire process takes only a few minutes.

Just login to your LinkedIn profile and click on the edit profile option:

Click on the edit option at the end of your username:

This will open a new window on the right side of your screen. Then click on “Create your custom URL” and type new vanity URL.

*Note: If there is already another user who has chosen the same desired URL, LinkedIn will offer alternate suggestions*

That’s all. Your custom or vanity URL is now set.

To know more on how to edit your LinkedIn Company Page, watch out this tutorial!

Twitter:

Log on to your Twitter account and open the account setting page in the top left menu.

Your Username is the same thing as your URL for Twitter so enter your new username in the Username box that you want to show up as your URL. It will look like: http://www.twitter.com/yourusername.

If the username is already taken by other user, then it will show a warning “Username has already been taken”.

Enter your e-mail address and password there in order to change your URL/USERNAME.

Click on the save button and your new URL will be changed.

Have any questions?

For any questions, feel free to post them in comments below!