If you hate Twitter or refuse to Twitter, do just one thing that will take no more than a minute. It will save you aggravation later if you change your mind and decide to join the millions of smart Publicity Hounds who are twittering.
Go to Twitter right now and claim your username so no one else can grab it—even if you doubt you’ll ever use it. If you’re lucky, nobody else has it. Here are three reasons why choosing your username right now is smart:
—Even if you never Twitter, it will protect someone else from stealing your brand. I’ve spent a long time building The Publicity Hound brand. Had I not grabbed the username @PublicityHound when I started tweeting about a year ago, anyone else could have claimed it. If that person had chosen an indistinguishable avatar and then started posting inane tweets, guess who would have looked bad?
—It lets you prevent others from claiming your name. I post all but a few tweets under my first account, @PublicityHound. I also claimed @JoanStewart even though I have only a few posts there. I don’t want other Joan Stewart claiming that as her Twitter name. And I might decide later, for whatever reason, to start posting to that account more often.
Don’t claim your name(s) now and you may end up with the same frustrating situation as Target, Ikea and Sony.
All three companies apparently failed to claim their own Twitter names, and the people who HAVE claimed them all have inactive accounts. At one time, Twitter released usernames if the accounts were inactive, but no more.
Before claiming your names, check out these eight Twitter username tips.
Here’s another valuable tip from Warren Whitlock, my guest expert during the teleseminar on “How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts—and Promote.” Warren said that when choosing your name, @JoanStewart is better than @Joan_Stewart because it’s difficult for people with mobile phones to type the underscore symbol.
Add this to your to-do list right now.