Twitter: Why a Long Username is NOT in Your Best Interest
By: Sandra Martini (see my bio)
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Have you noticed that while many people user their names for Twitter (a great idea in my opinion), some use much longer usernames, such as their first name and the name of their business.
For example, SandyAtMyBusinessName
What’s wrong with this?
While having your name and your business name is a great idea for remind people who you are, with Twitter, it’s too much.
Twitter allows us only 140 characters (including names, spaces, punctuation and letters). This means if someone wants to respond to a “tweet” you’ve written, your username counts against the 140 characters and therefore further limits the amount they can write.
Let’s take my Twitter username: SandraMartini
Time for a little math…
This accounts for 13 characters, add in the @ sign and it becomes @SandraMartini, or 14 characters which leaves 124 for people to write.
If I had used SandyAtMyBusinessName, that would have been 21 characters (22 if we include the @), thus leaving only 118 for someone to write.
So what’s your username?
P.S. Mine’s still SandraMartini. 
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| For the past 5 years, Sandra Martini has been showing self-employed business owners how to get more clients consistently by implementing processes and systems to put their marketing on autopilot. Visit Sandra at http://www.SandraMartini.com for details, compelling client testimonials and her free audio series "5 Simple and Easy Steps to Put Your Marketing on Autopilot". |
November 11th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Good point! I never even thought of that
Maybe I should have been tiff instead of TiffanyDow. 
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Totally agree. In this case, less is more.
July 23rd, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Twitter only allows up to 15 characters for usernames. In this context, your 13-character username is very long.