How to Change Your Twitter Username

: Image via CrunchBase

As I work on changing my last name (from Hyder to Kabani), I have to give serious thought to my personal online brand. Most people know me as Shama Hyder, and I struggled with the decision to change it. Then, it occured to me that there aren’t many Shama(s) out there, so I could just brand my first name. I promptely went out and bought Shama.Tv and proceeded to see if Twitter.com/Shama was available.

It wasn’t. But, it hadn’t been used for over a year. I remember Biz Stone (co founder of Twitter) saying that if an account hadn’t been used for 9 months, I could email Twitter support and ask them to make the switch. This was last October. I submitted ticket after support ticket to Twitter support-but to no avail. Then, finally, @admore on Twitter pointed me to this great article on how to snap up a twitter name.

So, I followed the SAME process and now, I am officially on Twitter as @Shama.

Here is what I did:

1. Emailed username@twitter.com and provided them with:

the username I wanted
my current username
answered whether I wanted to KEEP my current account and add this one or switch it over (while retaining my followers and messages). I chose to switch it over.

2. Received a confirmation email.

3. I woke up the next morning to find that my username had been changed!

I haven’t seen this process documented anywhere else but the site mentioned above. Going through support does nothing, so if you want to change your username on Twitter, follow the directions above. And, while you retain your friends, be sure to let them know your new username.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Greg says:

January 17, 2009 at 2:25 pm

Very useful post I gotta say…

I bet there are others that had the same kind of problem with changing twitter username…

Thank God I stumbled upon your blog post. Now I know exactly what to do in case I need to change my twitter account.

Thanks,

Greg

AnibalDoRosario says:

January 19, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Hi Shama,

Funny coincidence; just went through a twittername change as well, from @FigoRio to @AnibalDoRosario, to bring it more in line with my overall Personal Brand. Though I’ve got to say that in comparison mine was a jiffy using just the settings menu in twitter. The only -logical- downside is that I now have to zift through all my Social Media accounts and update the bio/profile details that link to the old account.

Cheers
@AnibalDoRosario

Irene Koehler says:

January 19, 2009 at 3:50 pm

I’ll echo @AnibalDoRosario’s comments. This is a very easy switch through your account settings. Takes just a second, confirm your password and, like magic, you’re done.

Happy tweeting!

Irene

http://twitter.com/irenekoehler

Stiennon says:

January 22, 2009 at 6:04 pm

First time I had seen how to switch Twitter IDs. Thanks Shama!

-Stiennon

Chris says:

February 10, 2009 at 9:42 am

FYI

Email received from support:

Due to high ticket volume, Twitter Support is unable to change usernames in cases of inactive accounts. Unless your user name issue involves Terms of Service violations, you’ll have to wait until all inactive user names are released. We’re working on a better long term solution for this.