Glenn Hilton's Blog

Yesterday I was at the Northern Voice blogging conference and sat in on a social media panel discussion entitled Who are you? Defining yourself in the online world. During the interaction, the question was asked if the panelists felt that choosing the handle you use on social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) is important or not. All of them agreed that it’s a very important decision and a couple of them (Jenn Lowther from 6S Marketing and Linda Bustos from ElasticPath) said that if they could do it over again, they wished they’d used their actual names as they felt that it would have been a wiser move in the long term for their personal branding. Unfortunately, they had come to the conclusion that making this change was not possible now on networks such as Twitter, as they both had too many followers and were concerned about losing connection with their followers should they change their username/handle (ie. @jennmae, @roxyyo).

In Twitter if you change your handle, all links that relate to your old handle will be broken (and there could be thousands of them if you’d been on the network for awhile). If someone actually clicked on a link or tried to direct message or @reply to your old handle, they’d see a message like this:

Also all your followers would need to be notified of the change, which could be a magnanimous task considering that you’d probably have to message each person individually. I resonated with this sentiment as when I look back now, I really feel like I made a branding mistake with my handle. Every time you post something hundreds of people’s eyes are scanning past your name and with that repeat attention, if you have something valuable to say and give, you will reap positive benefits and having those connected to your name can be very beneficial for you.

When I joined Twitter 3 weeks ago I really didn’t understand that. I thought Twitter was pretty much a narcissistic bunch of people who had a bit too much time on their hands who were compelled to share all the intimate details of their lives with the world. I’d seen status updates on Facebook over the last couple of years and have to admit they definitely added noise to the dashboard… “hmm, should I go with the sundried tomato or red pepper cream cheese on my sesame seed bagel?” What the… ? Besides superstar celebs, does anyone really care what us ‘lowly’ people are doing right now?

My thinking however started to change, when I received an email newsletter from my friend Mhairi Petrovic from Out-Smarts Marketing and she’d mentioned that her second largest stream of  business had come from Twitter, so I was a bit confused as how you could gain business from people doing glorified Facebook status updates, but hey there was a recession at hand so it definitely caught my attention. The next day I was reading a post by one of my favorite bloggers Eric Karjaluoto from ideas on ideas who’d expressed his opinion on why he thinks Twitter is going to die and somehow his insights on his experiences on Twitter got my curiosity up enough to make me decide to take the plunge and find out what all the buzz was about.

I really didn’t put much thought into my handle when I started. My former Hotmail address was canucksfan82 so I figured that was an option. It had a lot of personal sentiment because of my love of the Canucks and because 1982 was the year when I became a diehard fan when they went all the way to the Stanley Cup finals so I went with it. However in a very short time I’ve come to regret that decision. I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot more to Twitter than just blurting out your whereabouts. It’s actually a tremendous tool for helping you expand both your personal and corporate brand. I will be writing more on this in future posts, however for now let’s stick to the handle and how I’ve made the switch.

Steps to Changing Your Twitter Username:

1. Pick a new handle that will work best for the brand that you want to create. Check out Hubspots’s Twitter Handles Dos and Don’ts and Strategy for Creating a Twitter Handle for input on this.

2. Log into your Twitter account and click on “Settings”.

3. Enter your new handle into the “username” field and then wait for Twitter to check for the availability of that username. If it’s not available then you may need to try your second or third choice.

4. As soon as you find your choice available, then enter your “Password” (in the grey box that should have appeared below) and then click on “Save”.

5. Immediately “Sign Out” of Twitter and then sign up for a new Twitter account by clicking on the “Get Started – Join” button.

6. During the setup of your new account make sure to use the OLD handle that you were using in your main account.

Once that’s done you’ll now have 2 accounts. Your main account will have your new handle (ie. @glennhilton) and will have retained all your followers. Your new account will have your old handle (ie @canuckfan82) and you can use that account if you want for a secondary purpose or to retain it to catch any direct messages or @replies that your followers or others may respond to. You can then get back to them from your main account and give a notification of the change. I also suggest making a clear statement in the bio of your new account, that your main account has moved. This is especially helpful for new people who may come across your account and want to follow you as it will send them on to your new account saving you both time in you not having to get back to them to notify them personally, and them having to later waste time in changing the account they want to follow. I actually added a note in all caps in the bio of my new account that says in “I’VE MOVED MY MAIN TWITTER ACCOUNT TO @glennhilton” to try and make things pretty clear for newbies.

Does any of this sound confusing? It actually shouldn’t be as it’s a pretty simple change. And it’s fairly easy to manage after you make the switch too. There’s a number of apps you can use to track multiple accounts. I actually use Hootsuite (an online Twitter app) and  Tweetie (which is the best Twitter app I’ve found for the iPhone) to track personal and business accounts in one place.

And as you’ve probably figured out, I decided to keep my @canuckfan82 as a place to talk hockey with my hockey loving friends. The benefits of this is that I don’t have to create hockey noise for your other followers who may not be interested in hearing about the latest trade rumor or predictions on tonight’s game. A week ago I actually had one follower do a public @reply to say “Oh shut up about Canucks!”. Now to be honest the individual was actually one of my old college buddies and he was probably hamming it up a bit for fun but it did get me thinking as really there are so many spheres of interest on Twitter that if you get talking on one channel too much you can definitely create clutter on other channels. So it might be something you’ll want to consider.

UPDATE: New to Twitter? Need help getting started or tips on how to increase it’s effectiveness for you? Check out this post.