How to Secure Your Social Media Brand & Personal Identity

Creating an online presence using Social Media is becoming more and more popular, which means that it is becoming increasingly more important to maintain a consistent brand and personal identity across all platforms.  Nothing secures this better than owning the rights to the user name or vanity URL that is associated with you and/or your business (Example: twitter.com/username).

Why You Can’t Ignore Taking Action Today

A very popular trend that threatens full ownership of your online brand is “Cyber Squatting”, where individuals “squat” (registering  domains, user names, vanity URL’s etc. of popular people, brands, words or phrases) so that they may sell it to an interested party for a profit.  This has been a serious issue for brands since the emergence of the web, but is becoming increasingly more of a problem with the popularity of Social Media sites.

If the idea of Cyber Squatters don’t present a threat to you or your business, then consider the 337,572,949 people that are reported by Internet World Stats to be online.  Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t in your favor for being the only one wanting a specific user name, so the answer is to be the first one to have it registered with any given Social Media site.

Here are some of the risks associated with not owning your brand or personal identity across all online platforms:

• Your brand identity gets confused with the content of someone that shares the same user name you identify yourself or your business with

• You become difficult to follow or remember on multiple Social Networking sites by being forced to use inconsistent user names or vanity URL’s

• You risk loosing control of your brand’s reputation and image

• Your brand becomes watered down and you may not appear as “THE” expert in your area of specialty

• You can become the victim of “brand hijacking”, where someone uses your brand or identity as though it were you, leaving you susceptible to whatever message your brand hijacker is attempting to convey

• Expending great amounts of time and/or financial resources to reclaim your online identity

The EASY Way to Secure Your User Name or Vanity URL

You can secure your ability to promote your online brand consistently by registering the same user name across all Social Media platforms.  As a best practice, be sure to register your personal name, business name and any products or services that are unique (or trademarked) to your business.  This is especially important on the sites you are, or will be, most active in (think both short and long term).

Below are links to two sites, offering a FREE service, allowing you to check if your desired user name or vanity URL is still available at 100+ of the most popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites.

Too Late? Need to Get Your User Name Back?

If you ever find that someone else is in possession of a specific user name or vanity URL that you feel you have rights to, you have two options:

1. Contact the company that runs the site, and request that the user name be shut down and transferred to you.  Please note, you will need to show rights to ownership of the name, and this can be best obtained by Trademarking your brand, product or business.
2. If the company will not cooperate with you, then your only option is to contact the owner of the the user name and negotiate with them directly.

If you have any questions, comments or know of any other resources that you’d like to share, please respond in the comments section below!

TAKE ACTION:

Secure Your Social Media Brand & Personal Identity

1. Using NameChk or KnowEm, check to see if your user name/vanity URL are available at the most popular Social Media sites.
2. Set up an accounts with your unique user name/vanity URL with the sites you believe will be important to your business both now and in the future.