Facebook goes live with their username vanity URLs on Saturday at 12:01am (in your time zone).

So you might have seen a warning about this at the top of your Facebook page within the last couple days. Facebook is calling them “usernames” and people in the industry refer to them as “vanity URLs” but you don’t realize how important this can be!

On a first come, first serve basis, Facebook will be allowing you to customize your profile URL. For instance, if you are the first to claim “facebook.com/johndoe” that URL will point to your Facebook page. This will NOT change your name or anything else within your profile, it simply makes it much easier to point someone to your Facebook page.

Why do you NEED this?

Facebook is viewed as extremely important by search engines. Meaning if you can grab “facebook.com/yourname” it will go a long way toward establishing your name on the internet, and within the search engines. For instance if your LinkedIn URL is “linkedin.com/in/yourname” and your Twitter URL is “twitter.com/yourname” and then you can do the same with uber-popular Facebook URL, you will own the search returns for “yourname”

Straight from the Facebook Blog:

We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings.