Change Your Twitter Handle Without Losing Your Followers
We’ve been working through our rebranding from the Marketing Technology Blog to Martech. We’ll share a post in the future one why we’re going through that rebranding – but most of it centered around removing the term blog from our branding.
Luckily, most of our social accounts and usernames didn’t have the term blog in them – except for one! Our Twitter account was @mktgtechblog. This really was an oversight from day one. Every time someone asked what the username was, I had to spell it out m-k-t-g-tech-blog, then repeat it a few more times.
Since we’ve migrated the site from marketingtechblog.com to martech.zone, I searched Twitter for a username that had the term martech in it. Unfortunately, most were taken but I was able to see that @martech_zone was available.
Stop, Don’t Register It… Yet
This is where the majority of people go wrong. They register a new handle on Twitter and then go to their original account and tell everyone they’ve moved. The problem is that only a small fraction of their previous followers make the effort to follow the new account. In our case, we would have lost tens of thousands of users if we did that.
How to Change Your Twitter Handle
Unlike many sites, Twitter allows you to change your username! I was able to change @mktgtechblog to @market_zone on my account and not lose any of our 34,000 followers we worked so hard to attract. Once the new username was enabled, we then immediately registered our old username and put up a message that we’ve moved.
To change your Twitter handle, you need to navigate to your Settings Page (not the profile page). Your handle is listed in the first field. You can start typing a new Twitter Handle to see whether or not it’s been reserved. Once you update it to what you’d like, just save your settings. Now you’ve
changed your Twitter handle and never lost a follower!What if people are looking for your old Twitter handle? Well, this is the cool part – now register your old Twitter handle again and put up a message to let folks know that you’ve moved.
We put up the following message on the old account in the event that someone might click a link on another site or find the account in search results. This way, they would know we moved and follow us on the updated account.
Hey – if you appreciated this tip, be sure to follow us on Twitter!
Follow @martech_zone