PricePickle Blog

I consider myself a pretty internet savvy guy, but facebook seems to lack a concrete explanation on how to do this… so I figured I’d tell you how!

1. Usernames can be created for both profiles and fan pages. This is where I got confused. When you first setup your facebook account, you’re asked to select a username or (short URL). I chose my company name: pricepickle as my username. This was all fine and dandy, however it forwarded to my profile and I had yet to create a fan page.
2. So when you create your profile, you need to make sure you don’t use the username you want to use for one of your fan pages. If you did, it’s Okay, facebook let’s you change your profile username 1 time. You can change your profile username by going to Account>Account Settings. Change it to a username that you don’t want to use for a future fan page.
3. Now you need to setup a fan page. Go here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. I selected “Local Business” and designated my page name as PricePickle.com (your page name is NOT your username) I used PricePickle.com as my page name. Click the radio button at the bottom of the page and click “Create Official Page”. You now have a fan page with no username under your profile.
4. Now you need to assign a username to your fan page. Go to: http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click on the text that says “Set a Username for your pages”.  Select the Page name you just created from the drop down menu and enter in your desired: username for an availability check. If the username is available you can now use it to promote your fan page. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pricepickle (read #5)
5. Facebook is pretty good about protecting your intellectual property rights so they don’t allow you to assign a username to a fan page until you have at least 25 people that “like” your page. So you’ll have to promote your fan page with the facebook assigned URL until you get those followers. It’s a pain for you, but it prevents cyber squatters from jacking your name.

It was very frustrating for me to figure out how to do this and a bit sketchy to play around with my fan pages after I had some followers. I hope you find this tutorial useful.

Keith Ramirez
President/CEO
PricePickle.com