Changing Social Media Profiles Name

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Mozzers,

A client is thinking about changing their social media handles to shorten them to just their brand name as opposed to brand name plus the word 'apparel'.

What is the implications of doing this and does the link change from facebook/brand-apparel or does the URL stay the same?

Thanks

Gareth

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi Gareth,

On Facebook, if you have over 200 "likes" for your brand, you cannot change your name without Facebook's help. When you go to edit page info, you can request a name change through Facebook's interface. This also will change your vanity URL to your page. Facebook 301 redirects your old vanity URL to your new one. You won't lose any of your page "likes."

Hope this helps!

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Erica,

THat's great many thanks for your help. Is it a similar setup with Twitter as well?

Thanks

Gareth

[EricaMcGillivray]

With Twitter, you can do it all on your own. When Moz rebranded, we grabbed @Moz really early in the process so no one else would snag it. With Twitter, you can change your Twitter handle at anytime and still keep all your followers. Since we had both handles, we changed @Moz temporarily to something random, then changed @SEOmoz to @Moz, and the other one to @SEOmoz. And all our followers from @SEOmoz were then following @Moz. The only thing we had to reach out to Twitter for was re-verifying our Twitter handle. If you change your username and had a verified handle, it will de-verify it.

[Bush_JSM]

That's great Erica - really helpful.

What about LinkedIn? Any advice on migrating that or merging two accounts?

Many thanks for everything

Gareth

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi Gareth,

Glad it's helpful!

For your Company Page, I have some bad news: there is no way to change your company page in a rebrand. At Moz, we tried reaching out to LinkedIn with no avail. And they have no process to apply for a name change or a merge. We have to create a new page from scratch, lose all our followers, and have all our employees go and change their own profiles.