These days, just about everyone is on Facebook. Many people not only have their own personal profile, but have created "Pages" for their various interests, groups and businesses. Last summer Facebook opened up Username registration to their users. This allowed you to get a vanity URL for Facebook similar to this: http://facebook.com/patrick.hiller. That's the link to my personal profile on Facebook. You can do the same thing for Pages you have created.

The URL for my t-shirt shop fan page is http://facebook.com/WheeDesign for instance.

As with Usernames for Facebook users, Facebook has set up a few rules for choosing a username for your Facebook Pages:

• The names are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
  
• Once a name is chosen, it can never be changed or transferred – it will be your Facebook Page’s username and URL forever.
• Usernames must be at least 5 characters long, and will only be able to contain Roman characters.
• Facebook has restricted a lot of generic and trademarked usernames – so you won’t be able to pick things like “flowers” or “travel.”

In order to get your vanity URL, you will need to have over 25 fans for your Page according to Facebook. Though I recently saw that this number was actually 100. This is presumably being done to stop people from squatting on the names. The process is very similar to gettting your personal name.

First, go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ while you are logged into your account.

Then, you can click the link to Set a username for your Pages. Select the page you want to name from the dropdown menu and enter your new Username. Make sure you spell it correctly and it appears EXACTLY the way you want it to appear. You WILL NOT be able to change it later. Once everything is set, click Confirm.

That's it. Now you can access your Facebook page with your new vanity URL.