How to Give Your Facebook Profile a Custom URL

Facebook is becoming more and more important. For lots of people, including me, it’s one of the main ways they communicate. Often when I’m travelling, I don’t give out my phone number; I just add someone as a friend on Facebook.

RELATED: How to Make It Harder for People to Find Your Facebook Account

The problem is, if you’ve got a common name or made your profile harder for people to find, it can be really difficult for other people to add you, even when you want them to. There are thousands of John Smiths on Facebook.

The simplest thing to do is add an easy to remember username to your Facebook account, and with it, get a simple URL you can point people to.Let’s look at how.

Open Facebook, click the arrow in the top right corner and then click Settings.

Under General Settings, you’ll see a section for Username.

Click Edit.

There should be something already in the username box, most likely Your.Name.27 or something similar. I’ve already grabbed harryguinness, so that’s what’s in the screenshots.

Facebook requires that your actual name is featured in the username, and they reserve the right to remove any username that doesn’t closely match your actual name. That still gives you a bit of leeway, though. Something like HowToHarry or HarryTravels would almost certainly be fine. It also has to be unique and can’t include anything but numbers and letters. Periods don’t make a difference either: harry.guinness is the same as harryguinness.

Pick something that meets Facebook’s rules and is going to be easy for you to remember in a bar at 2am and enter it in the text box.

Click Save Changes and then enter your password.

Your username, and with it the URL people can use to visit your Facebook page, will be changed.