Brandon Coppernoll Web content management, internet marketing and social media in Indiana

HOW TO: Find your forgotten Facebook vanity URL

A recent comment inspired me into writing about the Facebook vanity URL. There was no doubt that when Facebook announced this many users were ecstatic to create an easy to remember URL that people could find them versus the old way with a bunch of characters in a query string. A recent friend made a comment on "What you need to know about Facebook @Mentions", and made me realize that many people may have this problem especially if they let Facebook create the URL for them.

First, I would like to say that I do find that Facebook really doesn't make it abundantly clear when you visit other user profiles and even your own what your vanity URL really is. This can make it difficult to remember all things considered.

Steps to find your forgotten Facebook URL:

• Log into Facebook.
• In the top menu find your name.
• Click on your name and in your address bar you may see something similar to http://www.facebook.com/bcoppernoll?ref=name.
• Remove the ?ref=name and that is your URL in its purest form. (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/bcoppernoll)

Unless you use this URL regularly you may have a hard time remembering this. I think this URL if used correctly can definitely be useful for family, friends and colleagues to find you. Here are things I do to help remember the URLs to all my social networks:

• Place all links in my resume. Beware only do this if you want employers to look up your social media presence.
• Place all links in my social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
• Talk about your social media presence and let yourself be known! If you talk about it you will remember.

This is how I found the vanity URL, but if someone has found it by other means please share because I think everyone can benefit.

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