Canadian Marketing Blog

Twitter IDs are the New Domain Names

It's 2009, so I would hope by now that any marketer reading this article online understands the importance of securing your company's brands as domain names. In other words, Acme Furniture should own and control the domain name acmefurniture.com (and, if it's a Canadian company, acmefurniture.ca as well) even if you don't yet have a Web site.

My question for you today is, "Have you done the same for Twitter?"

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is growing in popularity at an astonishing rate. The purpose of this article is not to explain or promote the benefits of Twitter; that topic has been covered by others: you can read all of the various articles about Twitter on the CMA blog here.

What I want you to understand today is that Twitter IDs (or "user names" or "handles") are the equivalent of domain names.

For instance, the Twitter ID for my personal brand, Bill Sweetman, is @billsweetman (which corresponds with the URL http://www.twitter.com/billsweetman) and for my corporate brand, YummyNames, it is @yummynames.

Even if you don't understand Twitter or don't think it has a role to play in your company's marketing efforts today, I strongly urge you to still secure your Twitter ID now.

In my case, I do all my Tweeting (as its called) as @billsweetman but I made sure that I registered all my other professional brands as Twitter IDs so that when and if I want to use Twitter for those other brands I already have the most intuitive Twitter ID.

I predict that over the next few years, millions of dollars will be spent by companies buying, selling, and fighting over Twitter IDs. I have already seen a number of nasty legal spats develop, and I have personally brokered the sale of several Twitter IDs already. And this is only the very beginning...

If you are Acme Furniture, you should make sure you get your hands on @acmefurniture right away. Since there is no fee to register a Twitter ID, you have no excuse not to do this. Simply head on over to http://www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

Don't be the person who in a year or two is having to explain to their company President why you didn't secure the company name as a Twitter ID. Take two minutes and do it today.

One final tip: Twitter will eventually suspend an account if it has not been used for six months, so make sure you post something once a month just to keep your account active and not risk losing your valuable Twitter ID.

This is very true. Many of Canada's largest organisations were too slow of the mark and their Twitter names were taken by other parties. I think its also a good idea to "bag" the Twitter name of any product lines or short taglines you use.

Twitter will indeed suspend inactive accounts. Registering a twitter account is not the only thing you need to worry about, you can't forget to keep it active.

Isn't this like signing up for a MySpace account to where business have used it to promote movies?

So all companies should rush out and get a @hotmail.com or @live.com or @gmail.com or Facebook page orYoutube etc etc etc. This is an extremely silly idea.

Twitter is a fad. The only thing Canadian businesses should be concerned about is securing their own domain names. www.canspace.ca registers them for something like $9.75 per year and you can put up your own web site and post more than 140 characters or whatever it is.

Personally I am LESS likely to purchase from a business with a twitter id.

I don't see twitter as being a great loss. If you think about securing your business name today, chances are that it is already taken.