Protecting your brand online starts with your domain name—by now (hopefully), you’ve secured a domain refl ecting your business name, such as renatosflowers.com for my make-believe shop, Renato’s Flowers. Your online brand extends to social media. Have you secured user handles for the major social media outlets?
Using my example, secured handles for the “renatosflowers” user or handle would allow customers to access your accounts with branded URLs such as the following:
❋ facebook.com/renatosflowers
❋ pinterest.com/renatosflowers
❋ twitter.com/renatosflowers
❋ instagram.com/renatosflowers
Although you may not be using these social media outlets, it’s still important to secure these handles considering that ANYONE could secure them with just an email including your competitors. A great tool to use to check this ASAP is namecheckr.com. You just input your preferred handle and this tool verifies availability—indicated with a
check mark. Luckily for me, “renatosflowers” is still available.
Best practice is to ask your web host or provider to create a generic email such as social@renatosflowers.com. This is the account you’ll use to secure these new social media accounts. You can then forward this to your account as the owner. This is a safeguard, so if you hire someone to manage social for the business, you just forward this email to their account as well … so, if they leave the business, you’ll still have access.