Social Media Account Name Alignment

Like all other elements of your brand, aligning your social media account names will help establish recognition, trust, and engagement with your audience. A consistent naming convention also serves to reinforce the connection between you and your audience across all of your digital platforms. So while this exercise might be a little tricky, it’s a worthwhile investment of your marketing time.

Establish a Naming Convention

Your social media account names should reflect that of your business and be easily recognizable by those you seek to engage. Here are a set of principles to follow when developing your social media account naming convention:

Chose a name that aligns with your company and brand
Your social media name should be as specific as possible
Avoid using acronyms and abbreviations that will be familiar to only your inner circle
Stay away from names that could be confused with another company, product, service, or individual
Consider your chosen name from the perspectives of others to ensure its appropriateness for all audiences
Your social media name should convey an official status
Not all social media outlets allow the same number of characters for a username and so you will need to accommodate that which is most restrictive
Not all social media outlets allow special characters in their usernames

Selecting Social Media Account Names

Because of the vast number of users on the popular social media sites, we recommend the following process to selecting your social media account names consistent with your established naming convention:

Develop a prioritized list of desired names
Check all of the social media outlets applicable to your business for the availability of these names
If a name is not available on one or a very few social media sites but is available on the majority, consider slight modifications to the name such as insertion of obvious abbreviations, adding a company title (e.g. LLC, Inc., etcetera), or appending the year (i.e. 2017)
Having identified an acceptable name to be used across social media accounts, quickly register these accounts using that name with the intention of later configuring the social media pages