How to get the twitter handle you want
Hello! So you have a great idea and a great name, you want to start getting the word out on social media but :( that handle is already taken by someone else. What do you do? What can you do?
Well, honestly, theres not much you can do these days. Rumors have it that Twitter used to allow other users to request handles on minuscule grounds, like claiming the name is inactive. Now its a bit more complicated but not impossible.
We started tweeting not to long ago if you haven't noticed (follow us! https://twitter.com/CoolFont). When we first got into the twitter game, @coolfont was already taken. We chose to go with @coolfont_co but that just didn't look right to us. We wanted @coolfont. The original @coolfont handle was created in 2012 and was inactive ever since. They were trying to promote actual "cool fonts" (lame). Their website was no longer active and they only had 1 tweet, also from 2012. This sounds like enough reason to get the account transferred over to us, just based on 'we want it and we'll use it.' But that isn't the case.
After some minor searching around we found out that pretty much the only way to 'steal' a twitter handle is to claim you're being impersonated by that handle. Well turns out you have to have proof of such a thing, and thats not very easy to do. But, with a little thinking, we got it to work in our case. Here's what we did.
We noticed the original @coolfont had their inactive website listed in their 'about' section and was also mentioned in their only tweet from 2012. So, for $4.99, we bought that domain for a year. It was www.coolfonts.in or something like that. We not only owned their domain name now but also many others under the "Cool Font" sphere. Now we have great grounds, although highly fabricated, that we are being impersonated.
And, Twitter agreed! They simply transferred our name from @coolfont_co to @coolfont in about a week. We feel like this is a rare case, honestly you probably won't get the twitter handle you want, but see if you can force an impersonaltion and give it a try.
Malcolm