When to Claim Social Media Handles for your Business
This post is simply a quick little tip for you!
When you dive into putting your business on Social Media, I always recommend that you start being active on ONE platform ONLY at first, and dive deep there. This prevents overwhelm and allows you to dig in a do the best you can there.
However, there is one little caveat to that.
Before you get going, it’s important to claim your social handles on every platform that you can.
Let’s talk about WHY.
When a business (with enough funds!) first claims a website domain name, they generally also claim all related domain names. For example: If their website has a .com, they may also claim the .net, .biz. and .org.
One of the main reasons for this is so that someone else doesn’t swoop in and take a closely related domain name, and possibly take some of their traffic.
Now, this is a little spendy to do, since each domain costs. BUT…. we can learn from that and apply it to social media! (Bonus, unlike domain names, social media handles are FREE.)
When you first get into social media for your business, go ahead and claim your page/ account name on every platform you MAY use someday.
This may include:
Obviously, you are not intending to start posting immediately on all of these platforms. But, you have now claimed your space there, and it gives you a place to come back to once you do want to expand your social media presence there, should you choose.
Another tip – try to have your name be the same or similar on each platform. This can get tricky on some platforms where the amount of characters are limited, but think through your name and see if you can make it similar.
It’s certainly not the end of the world if all of your social handles are not the same, but it can only help people find your page if they are related.
Which social media platforms are you going to start using for your business?