There can be many reasons that you’re interested in swapping your Twitter usernames. Before you do so, there are a few things to consider including whether it’s more appropriate to just start a new account and if the new handle is appropriate for your brand. If you’re unsure if it makes sense to change your Twitter username, just call on us and we’ll be there for you.
If you are absolutely positively sure that you want to go ahead and change your Twitter handle, you can achieve that by doing the following. (For the purposes of this example, I’m calling your old handle OldTwitterHandle and your new Twitter username DreamTwitterHandle. I could have called it NewTwitterHandle but I’m convinced it’s more fun this way.)
The good thing is that your DreamTwitterHandle becomes available and ready to swap as soon as you change it to DreamTwitterHandle1.
How to Swap Twitter Handles between 2 Accounts
- Login to OldTwitterHandle
- Navigate to your profile settings
- Change the Username of that account to OldTwitterHandle1
- Logout of OldTwitterHandle1
- Login to DreamTwitterHandle
- Navigate to the profile settings
- Change the username to DreamTwitterHandle1
- Logout of DreamTwitterHandle1
- Login to OldTwitterHandle1
- Navigate to your profile settings
- Change the username to DreamTwitterHandle
The trick here is that you’re swapping the username from a dormant or no longer needed account to one that already has all your followers, tweets and history. In order to do that, you can’t have the username on both accounts at once, so you need to use some temporary dummy names. The whole process should take you about 5 minutes.
If you do decide to go this route, make sure that for the first few weeks you periodically remind people that if they want to include you in new tweets, they’ll need to @ your new username.
Not sure what to do with the now dormant account? Check out our post on what to do with your “extra” social media profiles.
Thanks these instructions still work in 2019 and I was able to do the entire transfer in 5 minutes. Appreciate your help! – Dane
Glad to hear it, Dane! Thankfully, Twitter keeps things consistent and easy (unlike Facebook – ha!).
It worked!! You bloody life save, Thank you