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Create a short facebook url

9 November 2009 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered how to take your long facebook url and turn it into something short and easy to remember?

With the advent of custom urls this little trick may prove moot, but here it is anyway.

Actually, this little trick could still come in handy if you’re trying to brand your homepage as the hub for everything, related to you/your brand/ your business so read on.

If you do not have a custom url for your facebook profile, or you have a facebook fanpage with less than 25 members, then you probably already know that your profile url is something long like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kyle-TX/Marketing-Latinos/171332121035

As you can see, you can’t really relay that url in an effective manner.

These following steps will show you how to create a nice short url that looks like this:

http://marketinglatinos.com/fb

The trick is to create a redirect.

There are 4 steps to creating a redirect like the sample one.  First, you have to have your own domain in order for this to work. If you don’t have a domain name, you should at least, have the ability to create subdirectories.

Here are the steps.

Step 1:

Get the url to your facebook profile or fan page, in my case it’s:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kyle-TX/Marketing-Latinos/171332121035

Your url will be different than mine, so make sure you’re using your url.

Step 2:

Create a new webpage using Notepad or BBedit or Nvu or something along those lines.  DO NOT use MS Word.  Any way, create the new webpage with this code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html><head>
<title>Facebook Redirect</title>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kyle-TX/Marketing-Latinos/171332121035?”>
</HEAD><BODY></BODY></HTML>

Remember to replace the facebook url in my sample with the url to your profile. Name this new web page “index.html” and save it.

Step 3:

Log in to your webserver and create a new subdirectory on your domain. In my example, I called mine “fb”

After creating the subdirectory upload the new index.html file that you created into that subdirectory.

Step 4:

Test it.

It should work like mine does and automatically redirect people from your “/fb” directory to your facebook url.

Let me know if you have any questions.

2 Comments »

  • eunice said:

    uh could you send me a VIDEO cuz im REALLY CONFUSED!!!!! im really slow so please!! tahnk really appreciate it

    # 10 November 2009 at 1:40 pm
  • Rafael (author) said:

    Hi Eunice,

    With the advent of the new facebook vanity urls, you don’t really need to have something like this set up. I can still make the video for you, just know that with the vanity url the main purpose of having a facebook redirect like this is now a moot point.

    Cheers,

    Rafael

    # 10 November 2009 at 3:38 pm