How important are your social media usernames?
This is a question I have asked myself constantly throughout my blogging “career”. It’s pretty common knowledge that social media is very useful when it comes to gaining readers and sharing posts. Does your username effect how effective you are at publicizing yourself on social media?
The Long Story
When I first starting blogging, I looked up how to be a better blogger because well, I wanted to know how to be a better blogger. All of the articles gave pretty similar tips. Have the same username over different networks if possible. Share and post often. Yada yada yada. But there was one tip that always bothered me: use your blog name as your username, if possible.
Why did this bother me so much? Well there were a couple of reasons. First of all, I started using Twitter long before I took blogging seriously. Therefore a lot few people already knew me as @EmzChang since that was my username back then. I felt trapped to keep it. In addition, in the early days of this blog, it went through one or two, who am I kidding, it went through a lot of name changes. I think I changed its name every other week or so until I settled on Icy Cold Reads, only to change it two years later to Paging Serenity. If all my usernames matched my blog name, I never would have been able to develop a somewhat stable social media presence because my usernames would have kept changing.
A few days ago, I changed my Instagram to match the name of this blog. I wanted to take it more seriously and for me, changing the username signaled the beginning of a new chapter. And then I changed my Twitter username to match because having two different usernames was confusing.
It has only been a few days since the change but I have yet to experience any change when it comes to interactions on social media. My Instagram pictures still get roughly the same number of likes and comments. Same goes for my Tweets. There really hasn’t been any difference.
So What?
What I’m trying (and failing) to say is that it doesn’t really matter what your social media accounts are. As long as they are somewhat professional and unique and not something like @bookworm11445, you should be fine. It’s not the interactions that matter most, not the username. (That being said, you should definitely try to have the same usernames on different social media platforms to prevent confusion).
Do you think usernames matter a lot?
Do you have any social media tips that you want to share?
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