In order for anyone to SEARCH and find your Facebook fan page, or even your personal Facebook profile, you MUST be logged into 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 will routinely “miss” the opportunity to get MORE people to visit your Facebook business page? The answer is a BIG, FAT YES.

And that’s why the spirited hosts of Supersport’s 2010 South Africa World Cup magazine show “Harambee” routinely post the URL of their Facebook page on air. 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 members of your target audience who are NOT yet converts. .

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

This is why it is recommended that you get a “Custom Facebook URL for your brand”. The sentence above is the title of one of many freely available articles on the web 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. Login to your Facebook account

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

3. You will be brought to a page with radio button options. next to the suggested usernames for your profile. I found that 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 the name of your Facebook page in the Facebook search bar and press ENTER. Your page icon should appear before you finish typing the name, so click on 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), simply hit ENTER and then click on the correct link/image in the Facebook search results that are returned.

8. You will be brought to a page with a dropdown 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 about leveraging your name/brand effectively in whatever mediums you choose to use online. Don’t let Facebook create an unwieldy, long, hard-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 personalized Facebook URL today!