I am not Joe “social networker” nor have any pretension to be since I’m a perpetual late adopter/contrarian. In fact, I haven’t been on Facebook or Twitter meaningfully until the last month.
However, if I could go back in time to the early 1990’s and snare some of the prime virtual real estate like, wine.com, loans.com, etc. which eventually sold for multi-millions, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Though that’s not gonna happen, there’s a lite version of this opportunity on Facebook that is wide open right now.
If you have a Facebook account, your user page URL looks something like this: www.facebook.com/12345.
Last night at 12:01 am EDT, those who went to the URL, www.facebook.com/username were the first to grab vanity url’s, instead of url’s with numbers. Somehow, I snared www.facebook.com/copywriting.
There was a very cool countdown that happened when the page went live, and if I hadn’t been fumbling around so much to claim mine, I would have done a screen capture of it.
In retrospect, there are a dozen or so other sub-URL’s I feel are many multiples more valuable than “copywriting,” but since that relates to me, I’m happy to have it.
And the only thing that precludes me from creating multiple accounts and taking the other great keywords I’d like is the fact that Facebook, forseeing the greed of those similarly inclined, has prevented the vanity option for those who’ve created an accout after June 9, 2009.
A quick, random search on Facebook revealed all these sub-url’s are still available.
http://www.facebook.com/insurance
http://www.facebook.com/newyork
http://www.facebook.com/wine
http://www.facebook.com/sex
http://www.facebook.com/accounting
http://www.facebook.com/travel
Though Facebook will prompt travel agent, Jane Jones, to take some variation of her name as a sub-url, like www.facebook.com/jane.jones, she’d have a much more valuable (and cooler) piece of virtual real estate by choosing http://www.facebook.com/travel.
I have long suspected the social media angle is overly-hyped but I see this opportunity as being tremendously valuable in the long term. Just a week or two ago, a Russian company paid over $200 million for a less than 2% stake in Facebook.
To claim your vanity URL on Facebook, just go to www.facebook.com/username.
I managed to get http://www.facebook.com/directanddigitalmarketing.
Not the best, I know, but it suits my site perfectly.
Nice..I have mine at http://www.facebook.com/adesojiadegbulu
Thank you Laurence.
I just grabbed http://www.facebook.com/infopreneur .
By the way, I also sent you a friend request :))
Regards
Nabil
That was an awesome tip, I’ve now got http://www.facebook.com/CantonChiropractor
Thanks so much
Lawrence – Impressive – how did you know Facebook was going to do this?
Got my name:
http://www.facebook.com/onlinecopywriter
Hey thanks for the heads up, I managed to get http://www.facebook.com/carsguide
Love it.
All the best, be blessed,
Harry.