How can I create a custom URL for my Facebook Fan Page?

Glad my tutorial was helpful. As you'll see from these other Facebook fan page articles, my fan page is not only a place where you can sign up as a fan of Ask Dave Taylor (and please do become a fan of Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook) but also a place where I experiment and figure out how to do things easily in the world of Facebook.

First things first, though. It used to be you needed a ton of fans to be able to set a custom URL for your Facebook fan page, but then late in 2009 they changed it to a minimum of 100 fans. Just before the end of the year people experimenting realized that the minimum had dropped even lower, and as far as I know, you only need 25 fans to be able to set a custom URL.

To start, log in to your Facebook account, then in a new browser window or tab, go to the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/username

If you've already set a custom URL name for your Facebook account itself, it'll look like mine does:

As you can see, the custom URL for getting to my Facebook profile is "facebook.com/d1taylor" ("davetaylor" was already taken by the time I tried to get it, alas). Below it is what we want, though, "Set a username for your Pages". The first three words are the link. Click on 'em and...

Check out that pop-up menu to see what pages you have that are eligible for a custom URL:

You can see that I am an administrator of the South Africa Project too, but that's not what I want to work with, so I'll pick "The Ask Dave Taylor Fan Page". Now I can play around and try different shortened URLs to find one that works:

That doesn't work because they need to be a minimum of five characters long. Enter one that works, though, and you get a nice popup:

If you like the name you've specified and are cool with all the small print it displays here, then click on "Confirm" and you've just set a custom URL for your Facebook fan page, congratulations!

As for me, I found out through experimentation that someone else appears to have registered "askdavetaylor" as a shortcut, which is a violation of our registered trademark , so we filed a complaint with Facebook and waited to see what transpired. Therefore I didn't actually register "AskDT" after all, even though it appears I must have done so to get to this point in the process. Stay tuned!