Grab Your Twitter Name before Someone Else Does

21st May 2009

If you’re protective about your company’s brand name and image then you’ve probably already got various permutations of their equivalent domain names including the all important .co.uk and .com ones. But what about your Twitter ID?

For a long time now any Internet consultant or web designer worth their salt, have being advising their clients to grab at least the .com and .co.uk variations of their company and brand moniker as a domain name in order to safeguard against their competitors from getting them.

One of the driving factors behind this thinking is that it stops someone else getting hold of them, thus avoiding damaging and potentially expensive, cases of cyber squatting at worst or at best; loss of a company’s customers to the wrong website.

But What About Your Twitter ID?

Twitter continues to gain popularity and whether you consider it to be an addictive ‘must have’, or a flash-in-the-pan there’s no denying the fact that companies are starting to use it as a tool for marketing and promotion.

Consequently it’s no surprise that Twitter IDs are beginning to be treated like domain names.

Why Should I Claim My Twitter ID?

Exxon Mobil failed to claim their name on Twitter and was forced to deal with reputation management problems when an imposter started tweeting using @ExxonMobilCorp.
Jack Canfield , founder and CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprises, had to take a different Twitter ID because he didn’t act quickly enough to secure his full name (he has @J_Canfield , not @JackCanfield ).
The same thing happened to the large web developer community and book publisher SitePoint, which was forced to settle for @sitepointdotcom , rather than @sitepoint .

Because of this, a market in pre-registered Twitter IDs is emerging through sites like Tweet Exchange in a similar fashion to the domain resale market.

Claim Your Twitter ID

So if you’re serious about protecting your company’s brand and name on the web, get onto Twitter right now and reserve your preferred Usernames. The good news is that unlike domains, they don’t cost you anything. You simply need to set up a new Twitter account and either use it or leave it dormant.