—Even if you never Twitter,\u00a0it will protect someone else from stealing your brand.\u00a0I’ve spent a long time building The Publicity Hound brand. Had I not grabbed the username @PublicityHound <\/a>when I started tweeting\u00a0about a year ago, anyone else could have claimed it. If that person had\u00a0chosen an indistinguishable avatar and then started posting inane tweets, guess who would have looked bad?<\/p>\n —It lets you prevent others from claiming your name.\u00a0I post all but a few tweets under\u00a0my first account,\u00a0@PublicityHound<\/a>.\u00a0I also claimed @JoanStewart<\/a>\u00a0even though I have only a few posts there.\u00a0I don’t want other Joan Stewart claiming that as her Twitter name.\u00a0And I might decide later, for whatever reason, to start posting to that account more often.<\/p>\n Don’t claim your name(s) now and you may end up with the same frustrating situation as\u00a0Target, Ikea and Sony.<\/p>\n All three companies apparently failed to claim their own Twitter names, and the people who HAVE claimed them all have inactive accounts.\u00a0At one time, Twitter released usernames if the accounts were inactive, but no more.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Before claiming your names, check out these eight Twitter username tips.<\/a><\/p>\n Here’s another valuable tip from Warren Whitlock, my guest expert during the teleseminar on “How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts—and Promote.” <\/a>Warren said that when choosing your name, @JoanStewart is better than @Joan_Stewart because\u00a0\u00a0it’s difficult for people with mobile phones to type the underscore symbol.\u00a0<\/p>\n Add this to your to-do list right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you hate Twitter or refuse to Twitter, do just one thing that will take no more than a minute. It will save you aggravation later if you change your mind and\u00a0decide to join the millions of smart Publicity Hounds who are twittering. Go to Twitter right now\u00a0and claim your username so no one else\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":4,"wds_primary_category":683,"footnotes":""},"categories":[683],"tags":[619],"class_list":{"0":"post-3484","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-twitter","7":"tag-photos-graphics","8":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42110,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484\/revisions\/42110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"targettwitter1\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicityhound.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/targettwitter1.jpg\" "\\"targettwitter1\\"")
<\/p>\n