So first let’s get it out of the way. I was one of the geeks that was up late Friday night waiting patiently to get my Facebook username. I am pleased to report that I have locked down facebook.com/westergaard for my personal profile. I guess the early bird gets the … Westergaard. A rare occurrence of that name coming in handy. Too bad I cannot say the same for my friend Mr. Smith.

Now on to the real point. When assigning the username to my profile, Facebook asked me if I wanted to also secure usernames for several of the small businesses and organizations that we manage Facebook fan pages for. Sure, I thought and continued. Turns out I cannot create usernames for any of them due to a new Facebook rule. Each time I got a message that said that usernames can only be created for pages with 1,000 or more fans.

Maybe it’s just me but this seems incredibly counter-intuitive when the very way to get more fans would be to easily promote a catchy Facebook username URL. Much easier to promote Facebook.com/westergaard than it is facebook.com/profile/user123456, etc.

We help several of our clients with their social media presence and are very active supporters of Facebook as a great way to connect and share brand stories with customers. I often tease Dean that he sounds like he’s a sales rep for Facebook. One of my favorite things about Facebook has been the level playing field for brands. It’s always been fairly easy for a small business to have a similar presence to a national brand on Facebook. Now it appears that Facebook has slapped small businesses in the face (or a slap in the Facebook perhaps) by limiting their page promotional tools. Like Barack Obama and Coca-Cola have a tough time generating fans …

In what’s something of an irony I have decided to address this via a Facebook fan page. Let’s try to get over 1,000 fans ourselves and show Facebook that small business matters. Join the movement now.