Choosing your Twitter Name Wisely

Twitter is all the rage right now and so I wanted to get this out there before you all jump on the bandwagon and make some mistakes – the same mistakes that I did, well… sort of.

Choose your username wisely.

Your username on Twitter is your @. Mine is @seeking_balance. It’s not bad, but If I’d gotten on the wagon sooner I may have been able to secure @michelleevans or @imseekingbalance or even @seekingbalance (all of which were taken but the time I got there). I might have even thought long and hard and tried to get @isb or just simply @balance.

Here is what I want you to consider:

I think if you’re going to tweet personally, try and get your name; if you’re going to tweet for a company, use the company name. Those are ideals. Now that said, don’t use either of those options if the name is long; the shorter the better. Here’s why: When communicating via Twitter, you only have 140 characters to say what you want to say. When you tweet, your username isn’t part of that count BUT, when someone replies to you, your @username becomes part of the message. Or if you want someone to re-tweet what you tweet, they will include “RT @username” which then can make it really difficult to post your whole tweet, especially if it used up nearly the full 140 characters to begin with.

So choose wisely. Shorter is better. Your name is good. Your company name is good. ‘CandyAss427′ is NOT good. ‘QUuElz’ looks like spam and usually is. This is not the time to go with that handle you’ve been using for the last 15 years just because you use it for everything.

This is your brand online. Proceed with caution.

EDIT (Added April 14, 2009) – I just came across this really good post called Ten Things You Must Know Before Using Twitter. It’s useful… go there next.