How we acquired our ‘Strawberry’ Twitter name

Posted on Jul 8th, 2010 Tags: Web, PR

When we initially set up our Twitter account back in September 2009, we couldn’t get hold of the Twitter name ‘Strawberry’, as it was already taken by a user in Atlanta, USA.

As our website URL is http://www.strawberry.co.uk we th,ought it was about time we tried to obtain the Twitter name ‘Strawberry’ when we unveiled our new branding in June 2010. We are pleased to say that we managed to and since then, we have received several requests asking how we went about it.

In response we thought we would write a blog post to provide some advice to other businesses out there that may be in the same situation as we were.

When we started tweeting, we did so under the username ‘Strawb_Hull’ – which wasn’t ideal but it served us well. When we started to look into obtaining the name ‘Strawberry’, we found it was an inactive account and hadn’t been used since 2007. Whilst many people join Twitter to simply observe and never tweet, we thought we had a good case for transferring the name over to us – especially as we are a trademarked business.

So, we started by visiting www.twitter.com/help/escalate. This brings up a form where you can submit a request. We did so and chose the options ‘I’m confused and have a question’ regarding an ‘inactive username’. In the space provided, we explained that we are a company called Strawberry and were using Twitter to promote our business, however found that people were searching for us using ‘@Strawberry’ instead of ‘@Strawb_Hull’.

We fired this message off to Twitter and received an automated response full of instructions of what to do next. For us, the best route was to ‘trigger a review’ of the inactive username ‘Strawberry’ so that it would become available.

Within 30 days, we received a response and were able to change our username to ‘Strawberry’. To ensure nobody else could take either ‘Strawberry’ or ‘Strawb_Hull’, we immediately set up another account with our old name and tweeted a message to direct people to our new page. This meant that anybody following an old link to ‘Strawb_Hull’ could still find us on Twitter.

So there you have it. It wasn’t easy or quick, but with a bit of help from Twitter and some persistence, we managed to acquire our new Twitter name!