Platforms That Renamed Themselves

What a rename actually costs you

The platform changes its name and every reference you have made to it becomes slightly out of date.

An icon in your footer, the words follow us on, a line in your email signature, a sticker on a vehicle, and a sentence in a printed leaflet.

None of that breaks and all of it quietly signals that nobody has looked at your materials recently.

So the cost is not functional, it is the same cost as any other detail that has drifted: it reads as neglect.

The places to check

• The footer icon.
• The words beside it.
• Email signatures.
• Printed material and vehicles.
• Any page mentioning it by name.
• Your other profiles linking across.

The second is the one people miss having updated the first. A current icon beside the words follow us on the old name is worse than either being out of date alone, because the mismatch is what a reader notices.

The link itself usually still works

Which is why this gets left.

Platforms that rename keep the old addresses working, so nothing is broken and there is no error to notice.

That means the only prompt to fix it is somebody deliberately looking, which is why sites carry old references for years.

Check the link anyway, since old addresses do eventually stop working and the redirect is not guaranteed indefinitely.

Where you have a profile address printed on anything physical, that one matters more, since you cannot update it later.

A worked example

A business updated the icon in its website footer within a fortnight of the rename.

In December they found the old name still in their email signature, on two service pages, in a leaflet ordered in September, and on the back of the van.

The signature and the pages took ten minutes.

The leaflet had been printed after the rename, which was the finding that stung.

The van is scheduled for the next time it needs any work done to it.

The whole exercise was one search across their own materials.

Search your own site for the old name

Which is the practical method.

Use your site's own search, or a search engine restricted to your domain, and look for the old name.

That finds mentions in body text, in image alt text, and on pages nobody has opened in two years.

Do the same in your email templates, your automated messages, and any document you send customers.

Twenty minutes covers everything digital, which is the majority of it.

The physical items go on a list to handle when they are next reprinted.

This is the second one in three years

Which is the more useful observation.

A parent company renamed itself in 2021, and now a platform has renamed itself, and neither was predictable.

So this is not an event to respond to; it is a recurring category of maintenance, like a changed telephone number or a moved address.

The businesses that handled it in an afternoon were the ones that already knew where every reference to anything lived.

Building that list is the actual lesson, and it serves every future rename, rebrand, or change of detail.

It is the same list that a change of telephone number needs.

Keep a single list of where your details appear

Which is the durable answer.

Website footer, contact page, email signature, invoice template, quotation template, automated messages, listing, social profiles, printed material, vehicles, and signage.

Eleven items, written once, that answer every future question beginning with where else does this appear.

Keep it with the domain list and the file set, since it is the same kind of document and gets used in the same situations.

An hour to build and it saves an afternoon every time anything changes.

Decide whether to keep using the platform at all

Which is a fair question a rename prompts.

A rename is a reasonable moment to check what a platform actually produces for you, since you are looking at it anyway.

Look at what share of your enquiries or traffic came from it this year, honestly, and against the time it consumed.

For many small businesses the answer is very little, and the correct response to a rename is to remove the icon rather than update it.

That is a legitimate outcome of this exercise and it happens more often than people expect.

Check what your listing and profiles say

Which sits outside your website and is where more people see it.

Your local listing carries links to social profiles, and those fields were filled in whenever the listing was set up, frequently years ago.

Other profiles link across to each other too, so an old name can persist in three places you do not think of as your own materials.

Open each one and read the links rather than assuming they are current, since none of them will have updated themselves.

That takes about five minutes across everything and catches the references that a search of your own website cannot.

The counter-case

None of this is urgent.

An out-of-date icon costs a business nothing measurable, and nobody has ever chosen a supplier on the basis of a current social icon.

Chasing every reference across printed material is also disproportionate, since a leaflet with an old name is entirely understandable.

And a business that does not really use the platform can simply remove every reference to it and be finished in ten minutes.

That is much the fastest version of this job, and for a good number of businesses it is the right one.

An icon nobody clicks is not worth maintaining.

Search your own site for the old name, fix the icon and the words together, list where your details appear, and decide whether the platform earns its place.

What to do

1. Search your site for the old name.
2. Fix the icon and the words together.
3. Check email signatures.
4. Check automated messages.
5. Test the link still works.
6. List the physical items.
7. Build the eleven-item list.

Step seven is what makes the next one an afternoon, since a business that knows where every reference to anything lives handles a rename, a new number, and a moved address with the same document.

The rename itself is covered in Twitter is called something else now.

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.