In order for anyone to SEARCH and find your Facebook fan page, or even your personal Facebook profile, you MUST be logged in to Facebook. This implies that he/she would ALREADY have a Facebook account. And that’s the BLIND SPOT – not everyone has a Facebook account – yet, especially in Nigeria. Compared to our adoption of Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts, our Facebook usage is still relatively LOW.

However, most Nigerian companies want to appeal to a large segment of the society. Isn’t there a danger that in the process of assuming that people can find you on Facebook simply by searching for you, you’ll routinely “miss” the opportunity to get MORE people to visit your Facebook business page? The answer is a BIG, BIG YES.

And that’s why the spirited hosts of Supersport’s 2010 World Cup South Africa World Cup “Harambee” revue show routinely advertise their Facebook page URL on air. Coming back home, some Nigerian corporate organizations and businesses have also adopted a custom Facebook fan page username/URL to increase brand/name recognition as well as make them easier to find on Facebook, especially for the members of your target audience who are NOT converts yet. .

The purpose of marketing is to increase awareness about you and/or your brand.. So you need to make it easy for people who develop an “interest” to easily and quickly access resources that will enable them to learn MORE about you, without “getting lost” in their search for those details.

That is why it is recommended that you get a “Custom Facebook URL for your brand”. The above sentence is the title of one of the many freely available articles on the net that give you a step by step guide to creating your own custom Facebook URL in just a few minutes.

The steps to create your own custom username are as follows:

1. Sign in to your Facebook account

2. Type “http://facebook.com/username” in the URL input bar of your browser

3. You will access a page with radio button options. next to the suggested usernames for your profile. I found it made sense to choose the one that used my first name separated from my last name with a period.

4. Follow the instructions provided to CONFIGURE the username you have chosen.

5. If you have a Facebook page attached to that profile, you’ll also want to set a custom username for it.. Typically, a “Create a custom username for your Facebook Page” link will appear below the message confirming that your custom profile username has been created.

6. If you don’t see that message, type your Facebook page name in the Facebook search bar and press ENTER. Your Page icon should appear before you finish typing the name, so click it to go to the Page.

7. If the icon does not appear before you finish typing (be sure to check your spelling is correct), just press ENTER and then click the correct link/image in the facebook search results that are returned.

8. You will be taken to a page with a drop down menu containing the names of the pages. you have under your profile. Choose the name you want to set a username for and follow the instructions provided to check availability and finally set it up.

Summary: It’s all about leveraging your name/brand effectively in whatever medium you choose to use online. Don’t let Facebook create an unwieldy, long and difficult to remember URL for your profile or business page.. Make it easy for interested people, potential customers, as well as existing customers and even friends and family to find you on Facebook. Get yourself a custom Facebook URL today!