It’s a good practice to secure your ‘name’ on the plethora of social networking sites on the web, if only to deny others from securing the name first.
The other day I tried to secure the username ‘boomerangbooks’ on MySpace, only to find that it has been taken already by a small bricks and mortar bookstore by the same name in Texas, USA. Doh! Not that I was intending to use the MySpace account anyway….but it did teach me a lesson and gave me an idea for a post!
At the very least, I recommend that you get out there and secure your name on the most popular services quicksmart - namely Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. If you have the time, then you might consider doing same for those listed on the Wikipedia list of social networking sites. And here’s another list of niche social networking sites for you to sign up to as well.
Ultimately, it may be worthwhile signing up to these sites for the SEO value alone: because many of them allow you to specify your website or blog URL on a profile page, which in turn is indexed by the search engines.
It won’t be physically possible to maintain an updated profile on every site, but Ping.fm is a good tool for ’syndicating’ your updates and blog posts to all of your social networking accounts at once.
A prediction: the growing popularity of Twitter and the ability to register multiple names/any name that you wish on that site will result in major stinks in the coming months….in the meantime, make sure you snap up the account names that will be useful for your business.
