There’s lots of buzz about how you’ll soon be able to grab a personal username on Facebook (e.g. facebook.com/mark.evans). And, no doubt, there will be many people on their keyboard at midnight Friday to secure their Facebook vanity plate. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to grab mark.evans if I’m awake and can remember to visit Facebook.
The more interesting story is whether social media usernames are going to evolve into a market/business like URLs in which people are willing to pay healthy amounts for a particular username. If for, example, you’ve got twitter.com/business or facebook.com/searchengine, do those names have value to other people?
I think the answer is “definitely”, which could set the stage for username squatters to establish footholds all over the social media landscape – if they haven’t done so already.
If you’re curious about whether a social media user name is available, there are lots of services, including namechk.
For more thoughts on Facebook’s personal username program, check out Factory Joe.
Technorati Tags: facebook, social media
One Comment
We suggest registering company and brand names on the most popular social Web platforms to avert online reputation crisis. There have been many examples of disgruntled consumers/employees hijacking company's names (brands) on popular social media sites, and used as a platform for mobilizing anti-brand support. Karasma Media wrote about an interesting case some time ago. More recently, Econsultancy did a good sideline analysis on the case of Frontier Airlines.
Joseph
@RepuTrack