Branding, both for you and your projects, is now essential for anyone working the creative industries. Part of that is having an easy to communicate URL that is also Google friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key to getting rated as high as possible in search engines and one way to help is to make sure that your URL contains the actual keywords people will use when searching for you or your stuff.
For instance, if someone wanted find Gone Fishing on Google so they could buy it, they might search for ‘Buy Gone Fishing’. If they do, we should come up as number one in Google as I own the domain www.buygonefishing.com. It makes sense but not everyone does it.
And your Facebook profile is part of your digital signature now. Until recently my Facebook link was what appeared to be a long series of random letters and characters – a link for sure, but nothing I could write on a piece of paper, easily copy down or put in an email footer. So I recently changed it to…
www.facebook.com/chrisjonesfilmmaker
Nice and easy to remember. Also more attractive for Google. I also changed the Facebook page for the Guerilla Film Makers Handbook to…
http://www.facebook.com/guerillafilm
As well as starting the new Rocketboy Facebook page…
http://www.facebook.com/ProjectRocketboy
So how do you do it? It’s very simple really.
Go to http://www.facebook.com/username and you’ll see a drop-down list of the ‘pages’ you’ve created. Select the page you want, then enter the username you want for it (that’s the bit that will appear after facebook.com/) and click ‘save’.
You can only select a username once, so make sure you double-check your spelling! You also need 25 people to ‘like’ your page before Facebook will let you change the name. My Rocketboy fan page is brand new and so I invited a just few select people to join and monitored it until I hit 25, then immediately changed the URL from the random characters Facebook assigned to ProjectRocketboy.
It only takes a few minutes to do, provides a much simpler URL that is also Google friendly and well as client / customer / collaborator / financier etc. friendlier… Go do it now!.
Here’s the link to the Facebook tool again…
http://www.facebook.com/username/
Onwards and upwards!
Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com
I’ve been trying to change the URL for our production group’s Facebook page for ages from the huge stream of random nonsense to the incredibly easy to communicate http://www.facebook.com/cheesemintproductions and thanks to this I have.
I can’t begin to thank you enough for posting this! Brilliant advice!
Thanks, Chris, Oli – just changed mine to jamesdemarcofilmmaker.