Twitter Squatters: 87 of 100 Best Global Brands Have Lost Their Brand Name on Twitter

The parasites are already on Twitter.

Of course, I’m talking about screen name squatters, people who reserve brand names, real names, anything more valuable than their own sorry behinds.

Victims of Twitter screen name squatting include Britney Spears (although she has “reclaimed” britneyspears), Shaquille O’Neal (nowadays tweets as THE_REAL_SHAQ), Google and Apple.

Today I was working on a new business venture idea and compiled a short-list of possible partners that I’d like to work on this idea should I ever go forward with it. As I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit recently, I decided to check whether this brand had a presence on Twitter, just for kicks.

I was shocked to find out the the brand name and its variation had already been reserved as screen names. The reason I was a bit shocked was that this brand isn’t quite a mainstream brand. Sure, a well-known one but still relatively a niche brand I would say. And when I mined this brand category further down, I discovered that some of the way more obscure brands than this first one were also taken.

Well, as this kind of behaviour is too well known in the domain name circles, I already knew what the picture would look like for the big boys. Intrigued, I pulled out a list of best global brands for 2008 and started checking whether the companies on the list had a presence on Twitter. The results were exactly like I thought they would be, but they also contained a surprise.

87 out of 100 best global brands had their immediate brand name (and in some cases, even variations of it) already taken as a screen name by someone else on Twitter. The owners were either squatters, real people or websites and services promoting themselves.

Ten companies had been either wise enough to reserve the screen name in advance, lucky enough to have obscure name that they could get to before the squatters started gathering them or had already sucked up and bought the presence from a squatter.

Two companies (SAP and UBS) didn’t have account pages up at twitter.com/sap and twitter.com/ubs respectively, but the screen names weren’t registrable through Join Twitter form (not that I would’ve personally squatted them). One company (Amazon) has its immediate brand name owned by a geek who runs a service on Twitter that uses Amazon Web Services to retrieve prices of books.

41 out of 87 already reserved screen names were obviously or quite probably reserved and parked by a squatter. Many of them were offering a contact email address either in the profile or in a tweet for a brand owner to contact to if or when one decides to purchase back their brand presence.

While it was expected that squatters had exploited the big brands, I didn’t quite expect that brand name hoarding had already started in medium-sized and niche business categories, too.

Now that businesses are looking more and more into using Twitter, that some have predicted Twitter entering mainstream in 2009 and others arguing why the brands should belong to Twitter, it’s about time to protect your brand names by reserving respective screen names on Twitter, whether you plan on using them or not.

If you’re a Finn, you are in charge of your company’s marketing efforts and would like to learn how to use Twitter in your business, Kisko Labs is hosting a seminar about Twitter in February.

Photo credit: My Brand Exhibition

Tags: Brands, Marketing, Twitter