Vanity urls to increase ad revenues
Facebook have announced the launch of a publicly accessible Vanity url facility – meaning users and Fan Page owners will be able to get themselves a vanity url in the form of www.facebook.com/firstname.lastname, or variations thereof.
A lot of noise is being created about the SEO value in securing yours, although in truth, despite the PageRank, surely Google is smart enough to counter this when their bots come back to report thousands of new urls pointing at strangely similar content? With so many pages pointing out of the domain, the positive PageRank impact will be diluted by several thousand if not millions of links.
What’s more Facebook themselves have taken steps to avoid abuse, such as only being available to pages with 1000 or more fans.
Perhaps the real value of this will be, ironically, in “old” media. How long before we see the first social campaign to incorporate a Facebook vanity url the way we used to see AOL Keyword terms, to drive co-ordinated activity across media? In fact this could be the cutest move Facebook have made so far to drive ad revenue.
Large and fully integrated media agencies don’t seem to “get” the ad opportunities on social environments yet – or at least they’re not particularly great exponents of the environment. But if they can be introduced to it through the medium of familiarity; the subline on a poster, or the closing frame of the TV ad, then perhaps we’ll see more of them understanding how rich an environment it can be when executed properly.
And once they “get it”, Facebook will reap the rewards through advertising dollars.
