A Non-Blog

I strong armed my big sister into joining twitter today. She is @alisonpetsky and you should follower her. Originally though, she signed up with a twitter username that made no sense. It didn’t represent her at all, from a branding or personal perspective.

After some convincing, she changed it to @alisonpetsky which pleased me greatly. Pushing older siblings around can be rewarding.

Then I received a message from @jtrzpis asking about changing user names:

how do you avoid loosing all your current followers with a name change like that; will they not freak out?

Funny she should ask, because I have a social media story regarding that very thing.

@seakisst used to go by another username (i can’t even remember it now). I twittered with her a little bit under her old username, and even emailed back and forth a little bit (140 characters is so limiting). She’s a good quality tweeter, and a follower/followee whom I valued. Then one day, she was gone. Poof! Ok, it took me a couple of days to actually realize i’d not seen hide nor hare of her.

You know what I did? I emailed her to see if she was alright! It seemed really strange since, well, she’s essentially a stranger. But what if she got hit by a bus or something? How would I know? How would any of us know? So I did the creepy thing, and emailed her.

Tthe anti-climax: Turns out, she’s perfectly fine. She had changed her username, and I missed the tweet where she announced that.

So to answer @jtrzpis’s question, I would say this:

By changing your username, you risk some confusion amongst your followers. But will the freak out? If they do, it means they care.

This social media story was brought to you by my boredom and the fact i just wanted to tumble something.