Late last year, we re-branded our plugin business to Plugin Mill. At that time, I didn’t think too much about social media. The focus was 100% on the re-branding process and making sure customers and affiliates alike were taken care of.

Now, we were ready for social media and more marketing and so, I set about creating accounts and Pages for the brand. Imagine my surprise to find @pluginmill had already been taken on Twitter.

Could I have signed up and forgotten? I made sure to check all my records.

Nope.

Most people would try with a different username and move on. Normally, this would be my reaction but this time, it really bothered me because the account was established in 2009 and had zero tweets. None. Nada. Zip. It’s obvious it’s abandoned. Surely something can be done about that right?

A few quick searches gave me something to go on. Apparently, others have reclaimed their Twitter usernames successfully. Both of these people emphasized the one condition has to be met. That was…

The account has to have zero tweets. Bingo! I knew I was off to a running start and so begun the process.

Step 1: File An Impersonation Report

This felt a little strange because they aren’t exactly impersonating. However, this apparently gets you the attention you need to move the process forward.

Start at this page. Since we were a brand, I chose option 2 – pretending to represent my brand, company or organization.

Make sure you use and respond to all their support responses with an email address that’s tied to the brand name. So in our case, I had to use a @pluginmill.com email address.

Step 2 : You wait.

Yes, not exactly what we want to hear and I have no idea whether it would be successful but what would it hurt?

They responded immediately with a typical canned response about receiving the report and will look into it. They also asked to submit any additional information to prove these people were impersonating you.

I must admit this stumped me and not sure of the process, I let this reply sit without doing anything. After 2 days of hearing crickets, I decided maybe they wanted a response before going forward. So I replied, saying that I have no prove since the account has zero tweets. However, I showed them that I owned the domain name.

The next day, they responded to say that the reported username is currently inactive and eligible for release. I had to choose one of two options.

1. To replace an existing username with the username being claimed. In that case, respond with the username in question.
2. To create a new Twitter account (hence username) and tell them what it is.

I chose option two, replied them and the very next day – the username was transferred to us. Yay!

What If The Account Has Tweets?

I can’t answer that one. However, I did find out that Twitter has an inactive account policy. If an account has not been active for more than 6 months, they can permanently remove it “due to prolonged inactivity”. Knowing this, I’d still try if it meets the inactive policy criteria.

Sidebar: Let this be a lesson to everyone. If you have a brand name on Twitter, don’t squat. Keep posting.

Now that you know all this – follow Plugin Mill on Twitter and Facebook.