Create Your Own Custom Facebook Profile Address

January 15, 2009 by Jack
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Tutorials 

Social NetworkingI love using Facebook. It’s a great place to keep in touch with friends as well as network with new potential employers, contacts, and clients. The uses you can find for Facebook are limitless. If it involves any kind of networking, Facebook is the place where it can happen.

To take full advantage of Facebook’s networking benefits, you need to get as many people to your Facebook profile as possible. One way is to put a link to your Facebook profile on your business cards. While Facebook does have a public search page for every user, the link on it is very cumbersome and there is no way, within Facebook, to change it to something more usable. For example, my public search page is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814 . Not exactly svelte on my business card.

Fortunately, if you’ve got your own hosting, you can create your own custom Facebook profile address with a little .htaccess magic. The .htaccess file resides in your root html directory and it’s responsible for passing commands to your web server, including URL rewrites and redirects. For our purposes, we are interested in the redirects.

Note: If you don’t feel comfortable hacking your .htaccess or if you don’t have your own hosting, check out Making A Custom Facebook URL For The Rest Us

How I did it
My Facebook profile is located at http://unfq.com/facebook . It’s an easy to remember address that I can stick on my business card or quickly jot down on any scrap of paper I can find. To create this link, all I had to do was open up the .htaccess file on my server and drop in this code:

redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814

What does the code do? It does a redirect from the /facebook and redirects it to my public Facebook search listing.

Try It Yourself!
Ready to try it yourself? First decide what you want to call the link on your server. You can make it /myfacebook, /notmyspace, /facebook or anything else you want. Replace /facebook in my example with whatever you have chosen for your link.

Next, go to your Facebook profile and click on Setting-Privacy Settings-Search. On the search page, go down to the Public Search Listing and right click-copy link location to get the URL of your public search listing. Replace my search listing in the example code with yours.

Next, open up the .htaccess file on your hosting and add the code that you create from my example to the bottom of the file. Make sure it all shows on one line. Save the file to your server and you are set. Go ahead and test your custom Facebook profile address.

Problems or Comments?
If there are any issues, it’s probably because you didn’t make sure the pasted code was all on one line. Double check that and try again.

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    • Comments

    6 Comments on Create Your Own Custom Facebook Profile Address

    1. Deanna on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 11:20 am

      2. Great article. This FB noob thanks you!

    2. Jack on Fri, 16th Jan 2009 2:57 am

      3. You’re welcome. I was frustrated to no end trying to make a decent looking url and then I thought about .htaccess and a 301 redirect.

      There’s also a way to do it by editing your DNS CName records. It’s a bit more complicated, but maybe I will put up a tutorial for it on one of my tech sites and post the link here in a couple of days.

    3. Jack on Wed, 24th Jun 2009 10:53 pm

      4. While Facebook now allows you to choose your own username, with 200 million people on it, not everyone will get the one they want so it’s good to keep this in your arsenal.

    4. adnan anjum on Tue, 6th Apr 2010 7:37 am

      5. no tention

    5. kidus mebrahtu on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 8:40 am

      6. l love it

    6. kristina on Tue, 17th Aug 2010 11:17 am

      7. i realy want to go on face book.com i realy want to come on it

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