Pixels from the Edge

It’s cool that Twitter lets you change your Twitter name, there’s not a lot of apps that I can think of that allow that. But at the same time there should be a big fat warning sign when you do.  It’s no biggie, I’m not trying to scare you away from doing it or anything,  I had to change mine fairly recently (basically my old name sucked) and I’m glad I did, Twitter switches over all your friends and followers automatically so no issues there, but there are a few things that you should bear in mind before you do:

• Links -Any links that exist to your Twitter page will no longer have any relationship to you – comments you have made in posts, retweets others have made of your tweets, search results linking to your twitter page – these will all be dead, there is no grace period, your old profile is instantly killed.
• TwitPic – I imagine this applies to all the Twitter photo services out there but in my case I was using TwitPic.  The service depends on your Twitter username and as you are no longer that user then you have no control over that account.  And the new TwitPic account you will create will have no images in it (or in my case it had some – see below).
• Resurrection – You might find, as I did, that your new name is an old one that someone gave up. Just as the account you give up might one day be picked up by someone else, your new account might be someones old account.  Therefore you must understand that there might already be a relationship out there with your account – there may already be links to your new account, you may have photos that aren’t yours in TwitPic or another Twitter related service.
• Statistics -There are a lot of statistically driven third party apps out there and you may be using some of them.  And just like TwitPic it is highly likely they are tied to your account via your username, so when the switch is made the statistics will be lost.  And also,if you are resurrecting an old account you may find that these third party apps will be holding information for your new account that date back to the previous owner.

Like I say it’s probably not that big of a deal. If someone gave up the Twitter username that you are inheriting then it probably didn’t have much usage anyways – there’s probably not a whole lot linking to it, the TwitPic and other 3rd party accounts are probably barely if at all used.  But you might want to do the following:

Research

But don’t take switching Twitter username lightly.  It may be a move that you think is important enough to do but you only want to have to do it once, so take a moment to research the new name you are picking.  Do a search on it to make sure it’s not associated with anything bad (make sure it’s available first!).  Like maybe the user changed their name or closed their account because they’d got into some silly negative situations out there on the big bad web.  So take a moment to do some searches on the account in Google to see what pre established relationships it already has so you can decide if you want to inherit them or not.

Save, Purge, and Update

Before you make the switch and give up your old Twitter username, which essentially means you are giving up access to your own third party accounts, take the time to save any old data you want to keep – for example make sure you save your Twitpic photos locally, they may be your only copies.  And you will probably want to delete everything from these accounts – you will no longer have a relationship with these accounts so you wont want personal photos or information attached to them.  And when you have made the switch, if your new name is resurrected from an old user, make sure you go into TwitPic and such accounts and purge any old photos or data the previous user may have left behind.  And unless you want to start from scratch you could upload your old photos and data to your new third party accounts.

Secondary Account

I didn’t do this, my Twitter presence wasn’t huge and I was being followed mainly by friends (and I just didn’t think of it at the time!) but if you have a big following you may want to take this step.  As explained on this link after you change your name open a second account with your old name and place a simple tweet explaining that you have switched to a new name.  This will help with the issue of links to your old account, allowing the users who followed those links to find your new one.

Profile Picture

You might find you want to change your profile picture when you change your Twitter name, in my case it was part of a rebrand so I definitely did, but it’s worth hanging onto your old picture for a week or two to give your followers the chance to associate your old picture with your new name before you do.

First Tweet

And finally, you may find it useful to send out a first tweet under your new account name to let your followers know about the change.

Tags: Branding, Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 11:59 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.