Almost every business is creating a Facebook page now– both startups and established businesses alike. One of the most important decisions you will make when setting up yours is what you choose for your Facebook page name – because if you get it wrong, it can be hard to change. It’s particularly important to make sure that you are happy with your Facebook page name before you grow your fan base too much. Facebook is great for quickly getting a page up, starting to interact with potential customers and testing your ideas, especially for consumer-type products and services. However, if your idea pivots – and it probably will – you want to be able to change the name of the business and your Facebook page name. You canchange your Facebook page name – but only if you have less than 200 likes*. This restriction can be a problem for startups who are still in the customer development phase. So before you get to 200 likes, make sure your Facebook page name is appropriate and one you want to stick with.
How I stuffed up my Facebook page name
I started a Facebook page with the name 356 ways to Kickstart your Business. In fact, that’s where the inspiration for these startup tips began. I chose the name because I thought it might go viral. It didn’t. After a while the number of people liking the page started to grow and as I continued with it, I realised it would be better if the Facebook page shared the same name as this website. Unfortunately, at that time, my Facebook page was up to about 230 likes. So I was in the bizarre situation of asking people to unlike my page so I could get under 200 likes and change the name. Fortunately people were quite understanding and most of them returned quickly. However, I don’t recommend it as a strategy! Learn from my mistake and make sure you are happy with your Facebook page name before you hit the 200 like mark.
Action
- Are you happy with your Facebook page name? If you are not sure, do a quick survey amongst our fans and others to get feedback
- If you are happy with your Facebook page name, you can get a custom URL by going to Edit Page and the clicking on Username. Again, be careful about this because you can only change it once.
- And come and see me on Facebook.
Further Reading
* Facebook now allows you to change the name of a business page if you provide legal documentation and only if you live in the US. In other words, it’s not easy, you have to jump through a lot of hoops and Facebook can refuse your request for a name change. Kim Castleberry shows you how you can do it in her post How To Change Your Facebook Fan Page Name [Updated For Large Pages!]. She also steps you through how to change your name before 200 likes and how to get your custom Facebook URL to match your Facebook page name. Thomas Umstattd has a good article on some important things to think about when choosing a name for your facebook pagehere.
Join the conversation:
Do you have a Facebook page? How is it working for you? How did you come up with your Facebook page name?
This is an incredibly important marketing strategy. I had not even thought of this before but now I understand how it can really mess with any business. Thanks for the heads up.
Following on this post is the necessity to quickly run your name through the other platforms, twitter, google+, instagram, google etc to see if you will be able to have it across the board.
Twitter puts a restriction on the number of characters a username can have, a little tweaking early on may make a big difference.
Great idea Matt. Thanks for sharing
I like the valuable information you provide in your articles.
I will bookmark your weblog and check again here frequently.
I’m quite sure I will learn many new stuff right here! Good luck for the next!
I recently started a Nigeria base social network and the moment I finished designing this platform, I registered a facebook for it. After a while I thought about it, since my company (geeksvillage) has I facebook page, I should use it to promote the social network. What am trying to drive at is not every of your endevours should or must have a facebook page of its own.