Who is this “Ollie Parsley”??

Changing your Twitter username

September 7th, 2008. Published under General. 3 Comments.

I was watching the keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk at the New Media Expo. He was talking about personal brand and the fact he regrets getting the @garyvee username. The reason for this was that it had not relation to his e-mail addresses or other usernames. For example his e-mail address is garyv[at]winelibrary.com and his website is garyvaynerchuk.com. Obviously this has no relation to his Twitter username. An example of this is use is when a fan tries to e-mail him at Wine Library after seeing his Twitter account, if the fan tries to e-mail garyvee@winelibrary.com it will not get to him (I assume they have set up an e-mail forwarder in this case), but you get what I mean.

Anyway when I signed up for twitter I used a username I use for everything “olliedude2k”. I started using this name in the year 200 (y2k etc) and just use it for everything. As I am starting to pick up, and use my name as my brand I have used the username “ollieparsley“. For instance this site is ollieparsley.com, my viddler username is ollieparsley etc. So using @olliedude2k on Twitter seems to be counter productive as noone could make the link between olliedude2k and Ollie Parsley.

Anyway when I initially realised that i just signed up a separate Twitter account using the name @ollieparsley. I then posted one tweet with a link to my @olliedude2k account.

It was than after seeing Gary’s keynote I went straight to some websites and saw what the impact of name changing would be. There are some points that I needed to know and looked at the list of effects the name change would have.

1. You do not lose your followers or people you are following
2. Everything about your account stays the same (except your username)
3. People replying to your old name will NOT get to you.

With that in mind I decided to take the plunge. In my case I have 2 Twitter accounts and really just wanted to swap the names over.

Changing Twitter username

Please follow these instructions carefully. The aim of this process is to simply change your username and use a second account to capture possible tweets to your “old” username.

1. Set up a user with the username you want to change to
2. Open up a separate browser (for instance I used Firefox and safari) This is because you can have 2 accounts open at the same time. If you do not have 2 browsers just log in and out of each account instead of swapping browsers.
3. This stage needs to be done quickly. If you have a popular username there is a change it might get take in the few seconds between swapping names round.
4. Log in to the new account and rename by just placing a letter after it. For instance I put ollieparsley2. Then save it. This allows your current account to use the username.
5. Log in to your current Twitter account and change the username to the new username. For instance I changed olliedude2k to ollieparsley. Save your changes.
6. Swap back to the old account (remember you changed the name). So I logged in as ollieparsley2.
7. Change the username to your old name. So I changed ollieparsley2 to olliedude2k.

Now you will have successfully swapped your usernames over. Once done put a message on your old account saying you changed your username etc. Also don’t forget ot log in for the new week or so to check noone has messages the wrong account.

All you need to do is make sure people are using the correct username and also make sure that any web address links point to the right username.

If you have any questions please use the contact form. I really hope this was useful, any comments on this post area welcomed.