Are you catching all tweets relevant to you? Do you wish you could change your Twitter Handle?

Alison Williams explains how an easy to find name, set up correctly, REALLY is useful.

Changing your Twitter username – easy steps

When I first braved Twitter I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Social media in all its various forms has been a huge learning curve for me. And as time has gone on, I’ve realised that I got some things wrong.

One mistake I made when I set up my Twitter account was with choosing my twitter username/handle. I wanted to use my actual name and unfortunately I have a really common name, so Alison Williams wasn’t available, and neither were any variations using numbers that weren’t far too complicated to use. So I decided to use a capital ‘i’ in place of one of the ‘L’s in Williams. Sorted.

Problems arose however when I was tagged in a tweet. For example, a book reviewer reviewed my novel and posted the review on her blog. She tweeted the review and included my username in the tweet. But she assumed that my twitter username was @AlisonWilliams. Of course, it actually wasn’t. So I didn’t see that tweet and therefore couldn’t retweet it. This means I lost out on sharing that review with a lot of people. The same thing happened when an editing client tweeted how pleased she was with the work I did for her – she asked me a few days later why I hadn’t retweeted. I lost out on some free advertising there.

I realised that I needed to change my username to something that, first of all, people could spell correctly, and secondly that would lead people to me on Twitter. So I decided to change my username to @AlisonW_Editor

This means that people tend to copy and paste the username when including me in a tweet, meaning that it can’t be spelled incorrectly. It also means that anyone looking for an editor on Twitter is more likely to find me.

Changing your username is really simple to do. Just go to your Twitter profile, use the drop down menu to select ‘settings’, and change the username listed in the username field. Click ‘save changes’ and you’re done. It doesn’t affect anything on your account; you keep all your followers, and all your past tweets, favourites and lists are still there.

The only issue I had was with my WordPress blog. My account is set up so that when I publish a new post, a tweet is instantly generated. Despite me disconnecting and then reconnecting my Twitter account, the old username refused to budge. It was time to call in some extra help – my twenty-year-old son! Who worked it out in a couple of minutes.

As with a lot of things on WordPress, the simple things are often the hardest to find. So if you have a WordPress blog and want to connect your Twitter handle or have changed your Twitter username, here’s what you need to do:

Go to WP Admin
On the left hand side under ‘Settings’ you’ll see ‘sharing’ – click this
Scroll down until you see: ‘Twitter username to include in tweets when people share using the Twitter button’
In the box alongside this enter your new Twitter username.
Save changes

And you’re ready to go.

Tip: Make your Twitter Handle as close to your “Author” name (or Business Name) as possible so fans can easily follow you.

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