November 5, 2011

How to Change Your Twitter Username




Twitter is a useful weapon in social media if you know how to make more out from that. Do you get most out of Twitter? You may  use Twitter for different purposes. But rather than just a profile, you may use Twitter as a marketing tool to promote your business, brand, product, content or whatsoever related. Syndicating content, engaging with followers and retweeting about useful stuff are some basic scenarios at Twitter. But have you ever considered about how powerful your Twitter username when you promoting your stuff?


Username Matters...


If you are using Twitter for business or to promote a brand, you might have to think about your username. If it doesn't close enough to your brand, you might get into hot water. I mean if someone wants to find your profile via a web search or Twitter search, they will be really embarrassed. Does your Twitter username looks spammy? Then you have to go for it. Usually people don't want to follow spammy users, even if you asked them to follow or promote your profile at your website. So reconsideration of changing your Twitter username applies here.

What about the length of your Twitter username? Does it affects at all? If you are Tweeting by yourself it won't be a critical factor. But what if other users wants to retweet your tweets or tweet about your article or whatsoever? Unlike other social networks, Twitter allows only 140 characters in a tweet. Then users will find no enough room to retweet your message due to your lengthy username. So shorter username could be more efficient too. They are just basic scenarios where you need to reconsider about your Twitter username. There may be lot of  reasons available for you to change your username. However you can think or search about it on the web. By the way, do you know how to change your Twitter username?


Facts to Think About When Changing Username


Changing Twitter username is much easy and a typical option. The advantage is changing your Twitter username doesn't affect on your current followers, tweets, direct messages and @replies on your profile. Twitter will preserve all of them for you. So you don't wanna bother about importing content or notifying your followers about changing your username. But it doesn't imply that you should change your Twitter username whenever you need. That would be a malpractice and may occur inconsistencies over time.

Eventhough Twitter changes your username right after you submit your username, search engines doesn't crawl your profile or reflect your change in web search right afterwards. It may take some time to list your changes in their search index. So people finding you via organic web search still unable to reach you for some time. In addition, think about more factors and research about changing Twitter username before you proceed. And it may not possible to acquire your intended username always, as it may already taken by another user. So always be ready to try out several usernames and make a list of preferable and strong usernames before take the action.

Steps:

1. Sign in to your Twitter account.

2. Click on the user icon shown at the top pane and select Settings from drop down menu.


3. Now find Username field at Account tab.

4. Enter a new username in the Username field and you will be notified if it's available.


5. Once you set up a new username, scroll down to bottom of the page and click Save button to confirm changes.


Special Mention:

* I'd like to mention Kris Olin for his comment which reminds me to keep this post up-to-date.


Enjoy :-)




Awesome! Thanks for coming by and taking your time to read this post :) I hope you have learnt something today. Now you can share it with your friends and I'd love to hear from you too.






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Kris Olin said...

Yep, that's pretty much I did it a few weeks ago, Mayura.

Actually, I did some re-branding as well, so if you're interested have a look at my fresh article how it went: http://socialmediarevolver.com/how-to-change-your-twitter-username-handle/

Cheers,
Kris

Mayura De Silva said...

Thanks for stopping by mate :) BTW your article about re-branding is a nice one. And thanks for reminding me to update this one.

Cheers...