Claiming a Handle You Will Not Use

Why it matters more than it sounds

A handle is first come, first served, and once somebody else has it there is usually no route to recover it.

That somebody is occasionally a competitor, more often an abandoned account created years ago by nobody in particular, and sometimes a person with your name.

The cost of claiming it is ten minutes and an email address.

The cost of not claiming it is discovered at the moment you decide you want to be there, which is when a platform matters and moving fast is not an option.

What to claim

• Your exact business name.
• The short form customers use.
• The obvious misspelling, if there is one.
• On platforms you may never use.

The second matters as much as the first. If customers call you by two words of a five-word name, that is the handle somebody searching will try, and it is the one worth holding.

Say where you actually are

Which is what turns a placeholder from useless into helpful.

An empty account with your name on it and no information is nearly as confusing as somebody else holding it, since a customer finding it assumes it is you and gets nothing.

Put a line in the description saying you are not active here and where to find you, with your website address.

Add the logo and nothing else at all.

That takes another two minutes and converts a purely defensive registration into a working signpost.

It also means anybody who finds it can still reach you, which is the entire purpose.

A worked example

A business decided after several years to start using a platform they had ignored.

Their name was taken by an account created in 2016 with three posts and no activity since.

The platform's process for reclaiming an inactive handle produced nothing, which is the usual outcome.

They now operate under a variant with an added word, which appears in every listing and is a permanent minor confusion.

Claiming it in 2016 would have taken ten minutes.

They have since registered their name on four platforms they have no intention of using.

Use an address the business controls

Which is the part that goes wrong.

Registering under a personal email means the account belongs to a person rather than the business, and it becomes unrecoverable when they leave.

Use an address on your own domain, one that more than one person can reach.

Record the account, the address used, and where the password is, in the same place as everything else.

A handle nobody can log into is very nearly as bad as one somebody else holds.

That record is also what makes the annual check possible.

Check them annually

Since platforms reclaim inactive accounts occasionally and rules change.

Log into each once a year, which keeps the account active and confirms the password still works.

Update the description if your site address or your positioning has changed.

And check whether any new platform has appeared worth claiming, since one or two do each year.

That is fifteen minutes annually for the whole set.

The same applies to domains

Worth extending, since the logic is identical and the stakes are higher.

The obvious misspelling of your domain, the version with and without a hyphen, and the common alternative ending are each a few dollars a year.

Point them at your main site rather than leaving them parked, so anybody typing them arrives.

Set them to renew automatically and record the renewal date, since a lapsed defensive domain is worse than never having had it.

This is a small annual cost against a problem that is expensive and occasionally impossible to fix.

Know when to stop

Since this can become a hobby.

Four or five platforms and two or three domain variants is proportionate for a small business.

Registering thirty domains and accounts on every platform that has ever existed is a subscription to something nobody needs.

The test is whether a customer might plausibly look for you there or type that address.

Where the answer is no, skip it and spend the money on the domain renewals instead.

Those are the ones with a real cost of failure attached, and they are easy to overlook while collecting handles.

Watch for somebody claiming it after you

Since the risk does not end once you hold the main ones.

Somebody registering a close variant of your name, on a platform or as a domain, is worth knowing about even where nothing improper is intended.

Search your own business name once or twice a year across the platforms you care about and see what comes back besides you.

Most of what turns up is entirely harmless: a similarly named business in another province, or an old listing created automatically years ago.

Where something is genuinely presenting itself as you, that is a different matter and worth proper advice rather than a message sent in irritation.

The counter-case

Most of these will never matter.

The overwhelming majority of small businesses never need the platform they defensively registered, and the accounts sit dormant forever.

Dormant accounts also carry a small security consideration, since an unused account with a weak password is a route into an email address.

And name collisions are frequently harmless, since two businesses in different provinces with similar names rarely interfere with each other at all.

The exception is where you both serve the same area, which is worth checking before choosing a name rather than after.

Claim your name and short form on four or five platforms, say where you actually are, use a business address, and check annually.

The half hour

1. List the platforms customers might check.
2. Claim your name and short form.
3. Use a business email address.
4. Add a line saying where you are.
5. Record the logins.
6. Register the obvious domain variants.
7. Check the set annually.

Step four is what most people skip, since a claimed account with nothing on it leaves a customer who found it with no way to reach you.

What happens when the name itself changes is covered in rebranding a business that customers know.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.