When you create a Facebook account for your food truck business, you are assigned a random ID.  This used to be no big deal and probably not something a food truck owner would even think twice about.  But in today’s age of SEO it’s imperative to keep up with the ever changing digital world in order to stay on top of the competition.  Here are 3 reasons you need to claim your custom Food Truck Facebook vanity URL as soon as possible.

Claim Your Vanity URL For Your Food Truck Facebook Page

Marketing

You should be doing as much marketing as possible.  When you need to use your FB vanity URL on your truck’s wrap or printed advertising, which you often should, you don’t want it to say, facebook.com/pages/My-Food-Truck-Name/909442628111.  It just doesn’t look right and nobody is going to take the time to write down or copy that lengthy behemoth.  Changing it to facebook.com/MyFoodTruckName is much easier on the eyes and something that will not only help your branding efforts, but make it much easier for people to refer others to your page.

Competition

Chances are you aren’t the only person out there who has thought of “My Food Truck Name” for a food truck name.  While this may keep you from claiming the domain, MyFoodTruckName.com, you may still have a shot at claiming it on Facebook as, facebook.com/MyFoodTruckName.  So get online and do it!

Search Engine Optimization

The search engines, like Google, place a high value on URL’s when determining rankings.  If your URL isn’t exact match, or very similar, for what you’d like to be found for, (such as My Food Truck Name), you aren’t going to rank very well.  By claiming that exact match URL you have a great shot at ranking highly for your mobile food business Facebook page.

Now that you understand why it’s so necessary to claim a custom URL, here is how you do it:

NOTE: You only get to make this change once so watch for typos before you save the change.

  1. Login to Facebook under your administrator account for your food truck business page.
  2. Go to your Facebook business page.  (be sure you’re signed in as your food truck page and not your personal profile)
  3. Click “Edit Page” at the top right.
  4. Click “Basic Information” on the left sidebar.
  5. Change the username to your liking.

After you change the username, you should be able to see the new Facebook vanity url in your browser’s address bar like this:  facebook.com/MyFoodTruckName.

Here’s a few more tips for changing your Food Truck’s Facebook username and getting the most benefit from it:

  • Make it short.
  • Make it memorable.
  • It should match the common name of your food truck or be very similar.
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word to make it more readable.
  • No spaces or special characters. Only a-z and 0-9 are allowed.
  • Double and triple check for errors before you save because, YOU ONLY GET ONE SHOT.

Bonus Tip: Try to match your FB food truck username to your Twitter, YouTube and any other social media usernames. Consistency helps with branding.  Also, if the name you want is already taken, just choose the next best option and something that still closely represents your brand.  The goal is to have your food truck’s name in there and have it match (as closely as possible) to the actual name.

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