All Facebook Pages Can Get Vanity URLs Starting Sunday at Midnight
While the Facebook username landrush officially opened two weeks ago, Pages with under 1,000 fans or created after May 31 still haven’t been allowed to get vanity URLs. However, Facebook is lifting that restriction this weekend: starting at 11:59pm ET on Sunday, June 28, all Facebook Page owners will be able to obtain vanity URLs for their Pages.
Why did Facebook not allow all Page owners to get usernames at the same time as everyone else? Essentially, to mitigate squatting. Facebook wants to make sure every vanity URL that gets registered in the system is authentic, and put this restriction in place to prevent speculators from creating thousands of Pages in order to squat on vanity URLs. However, this rule has delayed legitimate Page owners with less than 1,000 fans from getting a vanity URL for over two weeks as well.
Millions of names have been reserved since Facebook opened up username registration. However, so far, username squatting has not been a widespread problem. Nevertheless, now that every Page is getting turned loose, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a fresh round of aggressive Page owners testing Facebook’s policy limits this weekend.
Update: Previously, this article said usernames would be available at 12:01am ET on Sunday. Facebook now says usernames will be available at 11:59pm ET on Sunday night.



June 24th, 2009 at 7:52 am
That’s great to know the actual time when we can start choosing usernames for our Business Page starting on June 28th.
I’m confused about something though – when I go to http://www.facebook.com/username right now, instead of getting a Countdown (like for Personal pages) or a message that indicates that my Page is not eligible yet because it has less than 1,000 fans, I get a message to Upgrade My Account to a profile page.
Is there another page to go to to register Business Page personalized URLs or is this a bug?
Thanks!!
June 24th, 2009 at 8:28 am
[...] clipped from http://www.insidefacebook.com [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 9:11 am
What about Facebook Groups? Many people set up groups rather than pages b/c it was easier to invite people… and now we can’t get URLs for our organizations… any tips/guidance/update?
Please!
June 24th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I grabbed my vanity URL. It’s http://facebook.com/number10.gov.uk <- Original, no?
June 24th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
[...] your group had 999 fans or less, you were out of luck… until now. This Sunday at midnight ET, Facebook will be opening the vanity URL feature to ALL pages, regardless of the number of [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
12:09 on the 28th and still cant get a username…i dont see anything on facebook’s FAQ about this, i dont know if it’s true.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I don’t get it. Am I miscalculating the time difference? I still get the “sorry, you are not elligible for a username” page for all my pages created later than May31st…
June 28th, 2009 at 2:05 am
crap
June 28th, 2009 at 7:39 am
You have to have 25 fans of the page first. Please become a fan of my page and I’ll return the favor if you need it. http://bit.ly/OwX5d
Thanks.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
there is something wrong, because in italy is 12:12, and i can not ‘change the url of my page
June 28th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I don’t understand this. I need help. What am I supposed to do?
June 28th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
And the number of fans required changed today from 25 to 100. This is pretty crummy of Facebook to make this change. I could’ve spent the last two weeks growing the fans for my month-old site, but there’s really nothing I can do that’s not spammy. I sent a tweet from the site’s account asking for fans, since those are people who have chosen to follow the site. I am not going to send a frantic message to all my friends and followers across all networks just to get a better URL. Since I am at 77 fans, I will just wait a week or two until I have 100.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
My page fulfills the requirements of over 100 fans and was created before may. But everytime i visit facebook.com/username they say that i need to create a personal profile first.
This i have not done as i’m worried that if i fill out and publish my admin as a profile it will only give my personal profile a username instead of my page.
Facebook needs a call centre!
June 28th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
its work now
June 29th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
[...] that users and larger, older public page owners have registered their URLs, Facebook has opened up registration to any page owner starting yesterday, Sunday, June 28 at 12:01am Eastern [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
[...] that users and larger, older public page owners have registered their URLs, Facebook has opened up registration to any page owner starting yesterday, Sunday, June 28 at 12:01am Eastern [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 6:06 am
[...] that users and larger, older public page owners have registered their URLs, Facebook has opened up registration to any page owner starting yesterday, Sunday, June 28 at 12:01am Eastern [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 8:29 am
ja moja sesra necu facebook da ti imas msn al ja pada
July 21st, 2009 at 7:51 am
[...] Meanwhile, Nora has ‘personal branding fatigue’ as a result of Facebook’s newish policy around personal URLs for your Facebook page. Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in [...]
November 10th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
[...] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/06/24/all-facebook-pages-can-get-vanity-urls-starting-sunday-at-m… [...]
December 14th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
[...] would also make sense — especially given the option Facebook introduced earlier this year to let users and Page owners create their own vanity URLs. Share and [...]
April 19th, 2010 at 7:57 am
I still don’t quite get this. I don’t want a vanity url for myself, just for the group I set up called What allergy? How do I do this? How do I get to the right place to set up a url for the group page? The facebook/userpage url just lets you do this for your public profile and gives me options which include variations of my name. I’m not bothered about that. Don’t need a vanity url for that at all. Just for my facebook page. Any ideas anyone? Has anyone succesfully got a vanity url for a group or fan page? and if so HOW?
April 25th, 2010 at 8:25 am
I guess that we care to much about Facebook(and not only).
Just ignore it!
November 10th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Buy quality facebook fans for great prices..
December 31st, 2010 at 1:49 am
Very good written post. It will be useful to everyone who employess it, as well as myself. Keep up the good work – for sure i will check out more posts.