Do Your Social Media Handles Have To Be Consistent?

 Have you ever looked at your Social Media handles and wondered, should these all be the same? Does anyone even care? Does it even matter? Well, we have the answer for you. To get to the point up front, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Domain names have been the key to online brand name ownership since the ‘90s, and as Social Media grew in popularity and importance over the last 10 years, owning your name on all the networks became just as key. Keeping your social handles consistent with that of your domain would be our primary suggestion.

Take High Season, for example. Our website is highseasonco.com, mostly because we weren’t able to get highseason.com (or @highseason) as, clearly, it’s quite a popular term. Once we decided on adding “co” to the end of our company name for our domain, we ensured that the particular handle was available across all social channels (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) before paying for the domain. Side note, we also bought highseason.co, highseasonco.ca and a few other variants of our brand and redirected them to our main website to own as much branded domain real estate as possible.

When discussing social handles, we often tell our clients to do a simple test - let’s pretend you’re telling a customer where they can find you online and list all your handles and domain out loud. “So we’re @my_brand on Instagram, @mybrand1 on Twitter, /mybrandcanada on Facebook and www.mybrandco.ca - oh.” They get it immediately. It’s not only lengthy to say and difficult to remember for your customers (and you, if we’re honest), but it also comes across as unprofessional and amateur. When you’re able to say “Sure, we’re @mybrand across all platforms, and mybrand.com online”, you’ll be perceived as a more professional business, and the brand retention in customers’ minds will significantly increase.

At the end of the day, you want to reduce all friction for discovery and not require any additional effort on the part of your customers to find you. If you’ve claimed all your handles and domain(s), when people search for your brand the correct accounts will immediately come up in search rather than people having to click through a bunch of links to find your business. Not only that, but having one simple handle and domain fits perfectly on your business cards.

So what do you do if the handle you want is taken? Get creative! You can add a suffix as we did with “co”, something like “hq”, or with words that represent your business like “designs” or “homes”. We wouldn’t recommend adding a prefix as you want your business name to be at the beginning of the handle whenever possible.

So hopefully that clears everything up regarding consistent Social Media handles. Keep ‘em the same, lock ‘em down from the beginning and you’re good to go. If you’d prefer to watch us talk about Social Media handle consistency rather than read about it, we got you. Get your own customized Social Media Playbook with all the tools, tactics and processes you need to succeed online. Learn all about it here: http://bit.ly/HSUltimateSMPlaybook

Ready to take your Social Media Marketing to the next level? Contact us so we can help!