Due to the exponential increase in Social Media, it is becoming more important than ever to make sure that you are using it to best effect for your company. We have even added a new Social Media section to our blog to categorize all of our posts! Because of the power that social media has to manage reputations and increase traffic to your site, there is now several sites that help you to protect your ’social media identity’.
Knowem.com offers a service to check the availability of your username across 120 different social media sites, and unique to Knowem, can then automatically sign you up to all the sites so that your identity cannot be taken by another user. This isn’t a free service, there is an initial cost for the sign up and then a monthly subscription fee which automatically signs you up to new social media sites as they spring up.
I don’t know much about this service, only what I have read online and on Twitter but it seems that quite a lot of people are already aware of the site, which was previously checkusernames.com. I would be interested in finding out if they have any ‘authenticity’ checks, i.e. if someone wanted to regsiter Elevator SEO, would they need an Elevator SEO email address or could anyone register it? I guess this would be much easier to manage on big names such as Sony or Manchester Utd etc!!
So how necessary is it to ‘bagsy’ all the names across these social media sites? Surely if you signed up to all of them you would have a very diluted social media campaign? Would it not be better to focus on just a few of the primary sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace etc? Additionally, during the automatic sign up, does it use the same username and password for each? If so, if someone found out your details for one site they would essentially have access to all 119 of the other sites you were signed up to!
After thinking some more about this, percentage wise how important is it to register your identity in other social media sites that don’t have anywhere near the same level of traffic? Also, protecting usernames is very similar to the issues a lot of website owners used to have with domain names. However, there are always alternatives you can use such as adding hyphens to separate words or adding ‘official’ in the name etc.
What the site does show however is the importance of social media, and just how powerful it can become if this kind of action is already becoming available. If anyone knows more about knowem, has used the service, or would simply like to add to this post then leave your comments below!
