Social Media B2B

Many marketers and social media types are excited for this weekend (Saturday morning at 12:01am EDT, actually) when they can finally get a vanity URL, or personalized domain name, for their Facebook profile. They can now have a Facebook profile located at facebook.com/myname to match their main website called myname.com. The people who care about this are interested in this from both a personal branding standpoint and a search traffic standpoint. This is another way people can more easily find them.

If you have a common name, and you want a Facebook vanity URL, you will need to be ready for this digital land rush of first come, first served usernames. And once you pick a username, it cannot be edited or transferred, so choose wisely. And don’t violate anyone’s intellectual property rights.

As a B2B company, why should I care?

Earlier this year, Facebook changed the fan pages, or pages that businesses set up on Facebook, to be more social. Companies with fan pages can now interact more easily with users and have updates show up within their fans’ information stream on Facebook. These fan pages can also get vanity URLs. And the signup is the same time as the profile URLs, Saturday 12:01am EDT.

The benefits for a company are the same as for an individual. It properly and easily brands your Facebook presence and helps with search traffic, so both your company website and Facebook fan page are more easily found. You can now publish and promote a Facebook URL that doesn’t look like a long string of random numbers. And more than 6 million users become fans of pages every day. That will increase when the pages are more easily promotable.

But my B2B customers are not on Facebook

According to Facebook they are. There are more than 200 million active users on Facebook and more than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day. And there are not just kids on Facebook either. More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older. And if you have a global company with global customers, you should know that 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States.

So what’s the problem for B2B Companies?

According to this FAQ for Facebook Fan Page Usernames, two of the specific requirements to register a vanity URL for your fan page are the page must have been created before May 31, 2009 and you must have had more than 1,000 fans before May 31, 2009. (6/11 UPDATE: The 1,000 fan requirement will be lifted June 28 per this Mashable article) Many B2B companies are just now exploring the benefits of Facebook and understanding that this can be another touchpoint with their customers to build and strengthen relationships. So while there are some B2B companies already on Facebook, there are many more who are not. And of those who are, they likely don’t have more than 1,000 fans. There is no indication if, or when, these requirements will change. I would hope that after the initial rush to register names, new users and page administrators can choose usernames on signup, but that may not be.

There could be very successful B2B companies with a good Facebook following and lots of customer and fan interaction that never reach 1,000 fans. Facebook is setting this arbitrary limit that only allows large companies to benefit from these custom URLs. I would argue that small companies would benefit more from having a vanity Facebook than a large company. It is an important part of their ongoing branding as they move onto the social web.

What can I do about it?

1. If you do not have a fan page yet, set one up soon. This way you will be ready for the next deadline based signup. This will let you learn more about fan pages and start accumulating fans for your company.

2. If your company name is a registered trademark, fill out this form so you can reserve your trademark name for your future use on Facebook. This only applies to registered trademarks.

3. Monitor other company’s pages by doing Facebook and Google searches to make sure others don’t infringeme on your intellectual property rights. Fill out this form if they do.

4. Set your alarm for 11:59pm EDT Friday night so you can register your own name as a Facebook profile name. You may not care today, but one day you will thank me. Otherwise you may wind up with a long string of random numbers at the end of your profile name.

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