Twice per week I will be bringing you one actionable thing you can do to begin optimising facebook fanpages, your website, your blog, your Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube profiles and pages.

Each task will be as short as I can make them because I know you are busy, but if you follow along all tasks you will see a huge improvement in your visibility on line and also the level of engagement you have with your customers and prospects.

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Today and in the next few Optimisation Project posts, we are going to be: Optimising Facebook Fanpages for Search.

This post assumes you already have a Facebook Fanpage, however if you do not, at the bottom of this post I have included a link where you can go to get started. Please read this post first as some very important things you should be aware of before setting up your Fanpage will be covered.

Step 1: Optimising Facebook Fanpages for Search

First thing to make sure you have setup correctly is your branding. At a later stage in the Optimisation Project we will look at Optimising your Facebook Fanpage for Engagement but for today I just want to concentrate on Optimising your Facebook Fanpage for Search.

Today’s Task:

Make sure your brand name is being used correctly.

This is a 2 stage process:
1) Make sure your Fanpage name is exactly the same as your brand name.
2) Claim your Facebook Fanpage Username.

First make sure you pick your brand name as your Fanpage’s name. This is extremely important. So if your company’s name is Yellowbrick Studios then the name of your Fanpage should also be Yellowbrick Studios. Take a look at the diagram below to see the two places your brand name should be showing.

The area’s marked with a 1 in the diagram above are determined by what you chose as your pages name when you sign up for your Fanpage. You can change this after you have setup your Fanpage but ONLY if you have less than 100 fans.

The second and possibly even more important thing to do is to claim your Facebook Fanpage Username. The URL for your Fanpage as pointed to by the no. 2 in the diagram above should also have your brand name in it.

Facebook call this a Vanity URL or a Username for your page. In order to claim your “Username” for your Fanpage you need to have 25 fans or more.

This is extremely important, because claiming your Username will allow you to lock in your brand and prevent someone else from taking it. If you have a Facebook Fanpage and you have not already claimed your Username I urge you to do it right now.

To claim your username, simply login to your Facebook account and then go here:

https://www.facebook.com/username/

A word of caution: Be VERY careful when you are setting up your username. Once it has been set it cannot be changed. If you make a typo, or any other mistake, Facebook won’t change it for you. Take your time when setting it up and double check before submitting your choice.

That’s it for today if you already have a Facebook Fanpage. If you have not yet gotten one, you can set one up by logging into your Facebook account and then clicking on the following link:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

As always if you have any comments or questions on optimising Facebook fanpages I’ll do  my best to answer them in the comments below.