Remember when Moz rebranded way back in May 2013? (Seems like a lifetime ago for this Mozzer, but, alas: startup life.) Well, since then a ton of you have reached out in our Q&A forum and on social media to ask just what we did to get this done.
Rebrands happen. While this is a late tale, it's a story better told late than never, and it's not as scary as you think, I promise.
Plan early. No, really early.
Don't put off thinking about your social media accounts until the last second of your rebrand. In several cases, you have to work with other companies to get things done, and you might have to file trademark claims if your new brand name's been taken. You're also probably going to want to have some new artwork for your Facebook background as well as other social pretties, which means involving your graphic designers. Not to mention, besides your name, you'll need to update company information, and I recommend putting documentation together to copy and paste from on game day. I personally got to work at 4 a.m. on Moz's rebrand day, and I can tell you that preparation saved me from a lot of terrible mistakes by this non-morning person. Not enough earl grey in the world.
You want to grab your new Twitter handle as soon as your company's new name has been selected. You may need to negotiate with someone who might already have your choice. (Note that it's against Twitter's terms of service to pay for a handle.) Or if there's only a squatter, you can reach out to Twitter for either a trademark violation or just their inactive account policy.
At Moz, we secured our Twitter handle @Moz almost two years before we rebranded, which meant that we were more than ready come rebrand day.
The actual switchover on Twitter was quite easy. We knew that we wanted to keep the old @SEOmoz account for monitoring and branding purposes, and we wanted to seamlessly transition all of our @SEOmoz followers to @Moz.
To switch, we first changed the @Moz account's name to something random like @Moz23, and then we changed @SEOmoz to @Moz and @Moz23 to @SEOmoz. I had two different browsers open and logged into both accounts, which let me make all these changes in seconds. All followers of @SEOmoz were then automatically following @Moz.
If you're verified, you do lose your account verification when you switch your name, but we were easily able to get it back by emailing our ad account folks at Twitter, who were clued into our rebrand before it happened. (We like to have backup plans for our backup plans.)
Facebook is perhaps a trickier network on which to change your company name, particularly if you have more than 200 followers and your new brand name is three characters or less. We have both at Moz, and this meant that Facebook had to make all these changes for us.
If you are changing an account with over 200 followers, you can apply to Facebook for a rebrand. We were lucky; at that time, we had an ads account person that we connected with directly; if there's one time to call in a favor, it's during a rebrand.
The good news is that since our rebrand, Facebook has made it easier to request a page name and vanity URL change. It can take up to several days or weeks to process on their end through this request page, so keep that in mind. I've also heard reports from those in the UK that this feature may not be released all over the world. You can also only change your vanity URL once!
Warning: Make sure you change your page name before you change your URL as Facebook needs to approve the name change.
Facebook required a ton of documentation from us around our rebrand. They wanted to see our legal trademark on Moz (easy enough with public records); our marketing documentation (we sent them an internal slide deck and screenshots of our new site in the staging environment); our rebrand press release; and documentation that we owned Moz.com. We also had to keep our fingers crossed that no one from Facebook would leak our rebrand (not that it was top secret or we're famous).
Unfortunately, if you're planning a rebrand and your company culture or rebrand situation is one of non-disclosure agreements and super-secretive plans, you may run into a roadblock here. Even at Moz, we questioned internally about how much information to give away without a non-disclosure agreement. You must upload documentation of your rebrand and legal rights to the new name. Here's what Facebook says:
All said and done, we gave Facebook enough documentation and gave them our new name and the date and time to switch over our account. At 7 a.m. on May 30th, we went from SEOmoz to Moz on our Facebook company page, with our fans intact.
Your vanity URL is an easy change in Facebook through their interface. However, you can only change a page's name once; so just in case your name change isn't approved and you are forced to start from scratch, you want to keep that vanity URL free. Once you change the vanity URL, you cannot claim your old brand, and the old vanity URL will redirect users back to the Facebook homepage.
Google+
If anyone actually figures out how to change a vanity URL on Google+, please call me! But I get ahead of myself.
Back in the day when it seemed like only Lady Gaga had a vanity URL, SEOmoz had one. The legends say that one day the gods smiled on us, and we were granted +SEOmoz.
I thought in my naiveté that I could change the vanity URL since we already had one, or that after a period of time Google would realize we'd changed our name and do it for us. I was wrong on both accounts. I'd also hoped that maybe once everyone else started getting vanity URLs, there would be an option to edit ours. No such luck.
You can change your company page name on the profile section of the interface to anything you want: smelly cat, lover of potato chips, trampler of paper dinosaurs. Or, you know, your new rebranded name.
Pro tip: the old garble of random numbers assigned to you will still redirect you to your company even if you have a vanity URL. At Moz, we chose to use the number to link to our company page to from our site. This was so you, gentle reader, didn't ask about site errors and so we hedged our bets in case we wake up one morning to a new vanity URL.
You also don't want to forget about reverifying your new domain URL, especially if you're working on authorship and publisher status. Make sure your web developer knows this, and don't forget to have your bloggers change their personal G+ profiles to reflect your new domain URL for authorship.
Our G+ company page reads Moz now, but that darn vanity URL still says +SEOmoz. Good thing Google doesn't care about SEO on its own pages. ;)
YouTube
Make sure your YouTube account—now forcibly associated with a Google+ page as part of YouTube's anti-spam efforts—is a manager of your G+ business page. Then connect them together so all of your YouTube videos will appear on your G+ page; you can easily share your videos there; and so all your YouTube comments and shares show up in your G+ page notifications. While you don't have to do this pre-rebrand, it will make your life easier as your page name change on G+ will change your YouTube name, too, so you only have to do one.
There are some odd rules on YouTube surrounding vanity URLs, though. In some still confusing circumstances where YouTube does not allow you to have a vanity URL that anyone had ever associated with an account—even if that account was deleted—we weren't able to secure Moz, but instead went with MozHQ for our vanity URL.
That said, as long as no one's ever had your brand name, you can easily change your channel name to your brand without any worry. Make sure your brand's YouTube account's cooperating with the new G+ page connections, and that it's associated with a non-employee business email address, not an employee's email, whether personal or professional. At one place I worked, an employee accidentally hooked up their personal email to the YouTube account, and we lost our brand name!
Pinterest is super easy. All you have to do is edit away and easily change your brand information to your new name. Don't forget, if you have a new domain URL, to re-verify your site.
If someone has your new brand name on Pinterest, you can file a trademark claim. When we were SEOmoz, we were successful in getting the SEOmoz username from a squatter. However, when it came to Moz, the very active user wasn't using the name in a way that violated our trademark, so Pinterest did not give us the Moz username. So we're MozHQ there.
Let me tell you, LinkedIn is not the community manager's friend. Sadly, rebranding is no more friendly. At Moz, we have both a Company Page and a Group.
Company Page
I have some bad news: There is no way to change your company page in a rebrand.
At Moz, we tried reaching out to LinkedIn so see if we could work something out, but no one returned our messages. :( Instead, we created an entirely new company page from scratch and posted a message on our old one that we'd moved. Which means we lost 7,000 followers there.
Special note: If you have a three letter name, LinkedIn will have a hard time displaying your new company name when employees go to update their profiles. After a legion of Mozzers filed support tickets with LinkedIn, we were able to get a workaround. However, before that, it kept trying to make us say we worked for Mozilla. :)
Group
For those of you running Groups, it's super easy to rebrand. Mostly because your vanity URLs aren't real vanity URLs, and you can easily change your name.
Note: We can't change our Moz Group any longer because we passed a 20,000 member barrier, beyond which you must get extra LinkedIn permissions to grow your Group. This happened post-rebrand, so we were able to easily change it in May.
Now for your vanity URL, you can literally type any words into it, and it won't matter. The numbers are what directs you to the right group. For example:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Moz-2976409
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Kittens-2976409
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Matt-Cutts-2976409
All those URLs go straight to the Moz Group. :)
While we aren't using Instagram at Moz—yes, I know!—it's pretty easy to change your Instagram information, as long as your brand name's not taken. Simply edit your profile name and it and the vanity URL change:
If your brand name is taken, you can file a trademark claim with them.
Tumblr
On Tumblr, there are two different places for you to change for your rebrand as you'll want to change both your blog's name and your URL. This will also likely depend on the purpose of your Tumblr. Here we use our Tumblr, Moz Health, to update our customers and community when things go haywire.
For the name, this is located in editing featuring associated with the blog's design and title field. (When I first started on Tumblr, I couldn't decide on a name for my blog, and it took me forever to change it from Untitled!)
For the vanity URL, your username is associated with it, if you're using tumblr.com as your URL. You can change your username to anything that's not already taken.
Redirecting it a URL on your site:
Special note: If you have more than one Tumblr blog, you cannot change which is your main Tumblr blog associated with your account when you're commenting via Tumblr. This can be frustrating. I recommend changing your username instead of starting a second Tumblr under the same username for your new brand. You don't want people going to your old brand name!
More than just switching names.
Of course, a rebrand is more than just switching names on social. You have to make sure your social media messages are aligned with your PR, content, and more. You also have to respond to the people reaching out to you (it might come in handy to share some tips on social media for CEOs).
On Moz rebrand day through the next week, we sent out over 800 message from the main @Moz Twitter account, and that doesn't even count the rest of our social accounts or our on-site blog and in our Q&A forum.
We had an entire action plan around the coverage for our community team, and I suggest starting not with the details but with your goals. Then, work down to those details and sharing with all those involved in the rebrand efforts.
Our community coverage rebrand goals were:
- Make sure that all accounts are switched over to Moz names.
- Make our audience happy with the rebrand.
- Answer 95% of all questions, in a timely manner, about the brand and the beta product.
- Have full coverage for launch and then next 24 hours as needed.
I'm happy to say that this part of our rebrand went very smoothly, and I wish the best for all of you going on the same adventure! I'd also love to hear about your stories.
Great discussion. Most companies have setup their social media piece by piece without a thought to branding. Great recommendation to take a look at social media as a whole and brand it along with your website.
Thats it - Twitter/Facebook/G+ no branding, but now they think about it - because you can read about branding every day. We need to fix it. Next time we do it right from the beginning.
In case of Moz it is a rename - I am still impressed how fast MOZ get into my mind and SEOmoz is out of it. But here in germany I still see some SEOmoz ORG Links in Widgets and old Logos in Tools
I love hearing how fast you adapted to Moz. It does help that it was part of our name from the beginning. :) But yeah, we run into a lot of old SEOmoz logos from around the web.
Hello Erica, Moz is becoming so popular day by day in Online Marketing Industry. I have a friendly question is that, Why Moz was changed its Brand name from SEOmoz to Moz? Was there any specific Reason behind it?
Yes, there were several reasons. You can read all about it on Rand's post on our rebrand launch day.
Thank You Erica. I read the Rand's Post and I got my answer.
I truly don't really remember how the SEOmoz site was looking. I remember the Logo, because I can still see it arround, but how the website looked like? Was there a difference? I can't remember.
To take the SEO out of the Domain name was exciting for me, I wanted to know how that changed the SEO rankings - Rand allready posted that the influence wasn't that big.
The Rebrand was a pretty good job!
Hi!
For what our site looked like pre-rebrand, take a gander at this from the Internet Archive.
As to the impact on our SEO, we saw a slight and predicted decrease in traffic. But we recovered quite nicely and actually have had around a 20% increase in organic traffic recently. You can listen to this webinar from Ruth Burr, our former SEO and all-around sharp person who led the SEO efforts for the domain migration and rebrand from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com.
And the truth is that often having all of these social profiles set up can dilute one's social efforts. I feel it's often more important to 'pick your playing field' based on where your demographic hangs out, and which network is best suited to the kind of content you're going to be posting/sharing.
Added benefit of working with only 1-2 networks is you put much more time into them, and you'll often get a yield much higher than if you were spread across 5-6 social profiles.
I completely agree that you should go where your people are and only branch out as you grow your social media program. It's like being a juggler and getting started with one piece you're juggling and then adding more on.
"At Moz, we secured our Twitter handle @Moz almost two years before we rebranded, which meant that we were more than ready come rebrand day."
Surely someone had to have the handle @Moz before two years ago, right? Did you have to negotiate or was it a squatter case? I feel like there is more to the story.
—
[edit]
Did some snooping around.. looks like this guy was sporting the @Moz handle at some point in time (see profile picture).
We reached out to him as it seemed more TAGFEE than just filing a trademark claim. And luckily, the stars were aligned in our favor, in that he happened to be a former tech worker and a fan of us. :)
That's awesome!
WOW... what luck!
Erica,
Thanks for laying out your process. I've imagined what such an effort would look like. As I thought, neither easy nor pretty.
RS
Yes, with some networks, I've very much like to have a word with their product teams about how to make the process easier for brands. :)
Social Engagement is the best way of interaction with your visitors and customers. Now Facebook also has started their local pages with review option.
Great Stuff Erica.. Thumbs Up
Certainly going to help in context of rebranding. I am bookmarking it and saving it so as to save any hassles and time if rebranding needed at later stages for me and my clients.
Glad you find it useful!
More Picard! Thanks, Erin. :)
Excellent guidelines Erica.the sad news is here about linkedIn.
Brilliant post Erica. You mentioned that you had heard some people in the UK couldn't carry out the name change request. We are based in the UK and recently carried out a name change request on Facebook for one of our clients after they rebranded, it sounds like we went through the same process as you. So hopefully it's available to everyone in the UK too.
It took us about 3-4 weeks because they told us that the name change would confuse people who liked the page, even though it was just a rebrand, the clients services hadn't changed. We had to explain this to Facebook and tell them it would be more confusing for people if our clients website, Twitter and YouTube page had a different name on it. So if anyone has any issues with Facebook saying a similar thing when you're rebranding, try explaining that to them. (It works even better of course if you're advertising with them and tell them you can't advertise under the old name and send people to the website with the new name on!)
Happy to hear that Facebook name change requests work in the UK! A couple months ago, I was answering a Q&A question about this, and the customer, who was from the UK couldn't find it, and then I asked some UK friends and they confirmed it. So it's awesome to hear that Facebook has since updated that! And hopefully, to everyone internationally. :)
That's great added advice about dealing with a Facebook name change when you get push back. I know we had 2-4 rounds of them asking for more documentation about our own rebrand.
Awesome write up. I have enough trouble setting up the initial branding let alone going through the rebranding of a company. This is a definite save for when we have to rebrand!
Thank you!
Thank you! Yeah, getting any brand up and running is hard work.
This comes at the perfect time, as I am rebranding my hobby blog. Thank you for such a clear and comprehensive post!
Best of luck on your rebranding! :D
Making sure your social media properties are consistent with each other is very crucial. Once your logo is designed and your mission statement is written then you can create your social platforms.
Paying for advertising before you need to switch makes a huge difference because you get an advertising account manager in the process. You now have a specific person you can reach out to who has a strong financial incentive to help you. Erica mentions her Twitter and Facebook ad reps in passing, but it's worth emphasizing their importance. Dedicated reps are much better than relying on the general help channels.
With Facebook, it definitely helped a lot. With Twitter, it's so easy to change your brand name that the account reps only helped to quickly re-verify our Twitter account. But we could've waited through their normal process as verification isn't super important to us. :)
What if you want to *merge* 2 twitter accounts?
For example @CompanyA has followers. @CompanyB also has followers. CompanyA buys CompanyB and wants to close @CompanyB and only use @CompanyA.
To my knowledge, you can't do that. With @Moz, we've chosen to just start responding as @Moz to inquires to those accounts, like @GetListed. But @GetListed also didn't have like any followers...
I had two G+ pages one local that had reviews and one business page that had the vanity url that I wanted to switch over.
Thanks for the help Erica. It has really given me an insight into how should I rebrand my company's account on social media.
Keep rocking ! :)
I've changed my vanity Google+ URL! It took about 3 months and 20+ emails, but it happened. I used the Google Places escalation form to do this. I had two G+ pages one local that had reviews and one business page that had the vanity url that I wanted to switch over. I was told to make sure I unlinked my YouTube account so that I could delete the unwanted page, then the escalation team was able to switch the vanity URL for me to my preferred page. :)
Interesting! That's really awesome. I know our business listings since our move had been wonky, and we're getting it sorted, but this may be something that we need to combine efforts on with our Local SEO folks.
You can get a lot done, but as ResultsDigital said, it takes a lot of pestering. I can get some non-standard things to happen from time to time. If you refuse to go away, sometimes the answer changes. :)
That's a great post right there, packed full some some great tips - thanks!
The worse for me is that period where your almost operating two social accounts (the old & new one) trying to get people to move over a bit.
Be great to get a follow up with moving all the local listing which can also be a pain.
Yeah, having multiple accounts out there in the wild can be a pain during the transition and sometimes hard to remember to check when things die down. Our strategy as Moz as been to answer all tweets to our other handles (except @Followerwonk & @Mozcast) by responding as @Moz, not the other ones. Luckily, our social management tool helps us with this easily.
Well, I'm not a Local SEO expert -- just dangerous enough to cause problems! -- so you'd have to hit up David Mihm or Miriam Ellis for that. :)
Really helpful post,
Our company switched Twitter usernames a month ago. We had @crearegroup first, then managed to secure @creare from a Belgium company who were not using it. I can't tell you how scared I was changing over the usernames, as for that split second anyone can claim it! This does indeed work though, allowing you to migrate your followers and retain your old handle. It's nerve-racking but is the best way!
I hope people are writing sign-up bots that look for premium twitter names that become available and register them!?
I was also super worried that someone would grab the @Moz name or the old @SEOmoz one in the split seconds that I was changing them. It was definitely the most heart-pounding part of the switch!
I haven't seen/heard of any bots doing this. And it would make me very sad.
Hi there, first time visitor. Thanks for this post, very useful!
I was wondering if you have any recommendations as to whether a brand should ever consider starting new social media accounts from scratch, rather than just changing the name on their existing account. I have a client that is changing its focus but wants to minimize the impact on its audience. (Actually it wants to keep a portion of its audience, but is deprioritizing the rest.) With Twitter it sounds like just renaming the existing account is fine, but we also need to think about their YouTube channel. Since the URL cannot be changed and doesn't reflect the new direction they're taking very accurately, I'm thinking about whether they should start a new channel completely or if renaming is enough.
Sorry for rambling, but appreciate any thoughts you have here!
It really just comes down to a purely business decision of how many people they want retain from their current channel. If it's a small number, they might be better starting from scratch. If it's a bigger number, they probably don't want to do that. It also might depend if, say you can email blast everyone who you want to move to the new channel. There's no clear-cut answer as it really depends on the business needs.
I couldn't agree more about registering a Twitter handle as soon as the name is decided. I once worked on a project (not on the social media team) where the social manager left this aspect until the last minute. They had designed a background, header, planned a strategy. When it came time to launch, they went to register the name and found out it (and many variants) had already been taken. Huge disaster. Great article, Erica. Thank you.
A little late but I had a situation where I wanted my Google+ vanity URL to be my name [+TimRuof] but Google was saying that it wasn't available.
I figured out that Google was actually holding the vanity URL for an old gmail account of mine that used the same first / last name. After I changed my first and last name to something else (I just used 'T R'), I was able to claim the vanity URL through my current gmail account.
And that's the story of how I got my vanity URL :)
SMM = More Traffic :) Good Post.
I have changed my Google+ vanity URL to +MdRashedulIslam1
Hi Erica,
My company is currently rebranding during our pre-launch phase. We've been following many of the steps to switching over social media that you've stated, however, we've encountered some problems you didn't touch on with Facebook. Facebook has a five character minimum for vanity URLs. How did you secure Facebook.com/moz? I contacted them through a trademark infringement form (we don't have a rep and could find no other relevant way to contact them) and received a response stating that there was absolutely no way they would allow our four letter company name that we have the domain and a trademark for, to create a custom URL. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
We were able to chat directly with an account rep (via ads) and secure our shorter name. Ironically, we no longer have a rep there, so if we were doing the rebrand again, we'd very much be in the same situation. I know one of the reasons they want a longer brand name is to make searches better or less cluttered. Sorry I couldn't be of more help!
Thanks for your fast response! At what point of using Facebook ads do you receive a sales rep? Unfortunately, Facebook does not make themselves very easily available for contact.
So I asked our paid marketing folks at Moz, and they said that you'd likely have to spend 20K+ a month, depending on your industry's vertical, to get a rep. That said, in the ads manager, there's a way to connection with reps with questions about ads, and this would be a possible way to get in front of someone's eyes. Best of luck!
If your rock band changed names, and you have a new Facebook page for the new name, how would you recommend handling the old page?
If you have any actual visits and engagement to the old page, pin a post directly people to the new page. If you don't have any visits to that old page, delete it.
Hi, hoping this 2 year old post is monitored :-) I'm going through a rebranding (due to legal reasons) and wanted to know once your name is changed (on Facebook, Instagram etc - where you are replacing your name on a current account) can people still find you using the old name? Using the Moz example, if you had a media release out there with only @SEOMoz as your Facebook link, could someone find you at @Moz? Obviously I will redirect my main web page, however as my new business name is very different to the old, it's unlikely to come up in a suggested search based on name alone. Facebook and instagram aren't making it easy to find an answer to this question!
Yep! I still get comment notifications.
If you're worried about brand recognition, you can mention in your description that you changed names. At least for a little while until people figure it out. For a long time, Moz had "formerly SEOmoz" or something of that ilk on all our web properties including social media.
You rock! Thanks for the tip about referencing the new name. I'm guessing that @SEOMoz wasn't discoverable and if by chance someone turned up they saw an error page.
Correct. If they search for your old brand name in the interface or would just say type instagram.com/seomoz, they'd get an error page.
Hello,
Great post. It's helped me tremendously as I'm in charge of re-branding social media during our transition. I have a question though: were you able to schedule the name/URL change for Facebook? I could request it today but we don't launch the new brand until Aug 1.
Thoughts?
The only way we were able to get it timed correctly was by working with Facebook directly. Which you can only really do if you have a Facebook ads rep. Though I wrote this post several years ago and Facebook may have changed a few things. (And I haven't rebranded anything recently.)
Do you have a recommendation on when I should request the change based on the fact that it could take several days or weeks to process?
It took several weeks to coordinate. But again, the only way we were able to do it is because we already had a contact at Facebook who helped us.
Hi, Thanks for this great post. I am just starting a new online business and I fell into the trap of not checking professionally the availability of all social handles. It showed they are available but when I came to sign up and take them, the Twitter one is "account suspended" and the Instagram is the same. I already have the URL and hosting but have a period of refund for that. My question: I am confused should I change my URL which is a hard thing to do as I cannot think of a replacement to what I liked initially, or add a word to the social handles? How bad is it if URL is different from social handles in your opinion? (I guess I am partly thinking loud as well)
You want to make the experience for customers and community as seamless as possible. The best possible outcome is having your username and the URL match for their ease.
If I am doing SEO for any client. I want to share his site on my social accounts.
can I have same username, email , picture, name ?
This is all great information that I am surely about to use, but has anybody thought about what happens to people who linked to your social sites previously? Those links are not going to work anymore... I've done a couple of rebrands... probably did it wrong both times, about to embark on my third and final one now but it would be nice to get some of that old link action! I guess it doesn't really matter. Hey, I'm having a social media existential crisis here
I wouldn't worry too much about links and the like since you don't have any control over redirects on websites you don't own. Because most all social media sites have powerful domain authority anyway, likely the SERPs will adjust on their own.
Hello Erica ,Our organisation is going through the same process, we recently shifted from MeraCareerGuide.com to CareerGuide.com and to be frank rebranding social accounts isn't some easy job.Although we successfully managed to rebrand twitter and g+ accounts but facing some problem with facebook and linkedin, specially facebook.I asked them to change our fb page name and instead they changed our page name as well as our page url (username) which was not required. Now they are only replying that its their policy that a user can change his/her username only once . I explained everything, still the issue is unresolved . So can you please assist me regarding how can i contact facebook directly on call or if their is any way my problem can resolve.
Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't do any kind of customer service. I do not have any contacts there.
@surya did you find any contact details for the same? How did you go about it?
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To change your vanity URL on G+ just delete the current one, wait for Google to suggest the new one, usually happens in less than 24hrs now.
Great post! But how did you get Facebook to flip the switch for you at an exact time? It seems that nowadays, you apply online and it takes up to "3 business days" - but can you tell them when you want to make the change? I'm afraid to make the request, they'll change the page way too soon. Any thoughts or advice on how to arrange this on Facebook? Thanks!
Unfortunately, you can only specify a time if you're working directly with one their reps. Otherwise, you just have to wait for their up to 3 days time period.
Nice post Erica McGillivray. It will be helpful in search engines marketing. I am agree on your ideas behind writing this post.
I have a question that hopefully someone maybe able to answer.
We are currently going through a rebrand as far as website/content goes. The business name will stay the same, but the original website is sandboxed, and we are making every effort to distance the social profiles from the old website. This includes at least 8 months worth of posting, etc. My questions is, is it more helpful to delete all posts referencing the old site, or try to make edits to them so they're pointing at the new site?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Most articles are only in reference to a re-brand, as far as Business Name is concerned. We're really looking more for insights on the social posts themselves.
It's pretty unlikely that the old posts are still getting traction. Most posts essentially "die" within several hours of being posted, so you're likely not going to see any returns on your efforts by going back through them to delete and replace old URLs with the the new one. In this case, I'd delete those old posts and start anew.
Although you have discussed all goods social media accounts but i want to add 2 more accounts.
1.Foursquare
2.Vimeo
It would help you to get traffic even I get good traffic from these two accounts. From these accounts re-branding can be done very effectively.
Yes, we combined the Foursquare efforts in with our local SEO changes for the rebrand and now office move. And if you have a Vimeo totally.
Rebranding... not for the feint of hearth! We've done one of those and it is worth the planning and preparation before putting fingers to the keyboard. This was just social media rebranding, but add print materials, storefront and internal documents and policies and it is a heck of ride. Great play by play Erica.
Yep, for the full rebranding, it was all company effort for sure!!
Yeah...Branding is very important, I remember we were told to secure all social media channels for one of our client & they were already taken by someone else & I ended up convincing the person sell those to my client to make my client happy & secure brand...So guys do not take your Brand lightly with Social Media Channels... :)
Interesting read, Erica. Did you ever find sites such as KnowEm.com useful at all?
KnowEm.com is more useful if you've never done any social media for your brand. To use it for a rebrand, you need to know which networks don't allow you to switch (LinkedIn) or allow you to "swap" usernames (Twitter) so you have them on rebrand day.
That is a very straight forward and simplified roadmap for people. Thankyou. It's interesting the different experiences other people have had though. Do you think Linked In was just picking on you because you're nearly as big as them? ;-)
I think we're pretty far from being as big as LinkedIn. I know, from a business perspective, LinkedIn is focused on getting more users and being a content serving platform over a community platform, and the weakest areas of LinkedIn, from my POV, is always what I'd call community management features.
Very thorough insight into the rebranding social media accounts.
Great post Erica!
Far for me to disagree, but I have successfully rebranded a Linkedin company page when our company changed name, I reached out via email and they changed it for me
That's awesome! Unfortunately, no one responded to our requests. Probably just how the cookie crumples.
Yes Erica, I have also good experience with Linkedin in rebranding they are prompt in response. Well, You have done a great effort in this post. This is really nice information for beginners.
Thank You!
Yousuf
Awesome post Erica. We just experienced all this rebranding from seOverflow to Inflow. As for LinkedIn we also were able to successfully rebrand the company page. The URL also has a version with a number in it that you can use too just in case. Similar to G+ in that way.
That's awesome to hear. I've seen what a great job you've done changing to Inflow. Sharp!
Uff its too hard to rebrand , but its interesting enough to do.
Thanks for this timely post Erica. We recently rebranded E2M Solutions to E2M and relaunched the website which you can see here - https://www.e2msolutions.com/. I think your suggestions would help us :)
Cheers!
This blog post that glosses over pretty much the entirety of the Twitter process. I wrote a post to that fact but I see it was edited out.
That's too bad. It filled in the gaps missing in the content above.
That was my mistake. I had meant to include a non-hyperlinked URL to the post, which is at https://subtle.ly/three-tips-to-rebrand-on-twitter/.
Ah, thanks. I will post that way in the future.
Hi Erica,
I am in process of rebranding the social media image of our news website, which publish contents in regional language(Hindi). The person who handled our social media portals somehow generated fake likes in big quantity. The people talking about it in facebook is only 3% of total audience. Hence, I like few tips to revive our audience and increase PTAI. Apart from this, I also have some strange query about Google's process of analyzing the contents in regional languages.
Please help... Regards Anant
Hi Anant -- Unfortunately, Facebook has no bulk way to get rid of "likes" that you bought and are just spammy accounts. You can unfollow them 1 by 1, but we've had community members who've tried this and then Facebook has temporarily blocked them from doing this at all. So...there's really no method at all.
That said, Facebook just did a bunch of tweaks to their algo, and you'll find that, even if you have 100% legit organic "likes," you will only see around 3% engagement because that's all the people that Facebook's showing your information too. Unless you pay them.
Hope this at least helps to bring info back to your team.
Ah, Moz. You guys are funny. "Yea just grab a three-letter Twitter account... two years ago."
I decided to supplement the information here with some of my own, but only as it pertains to Twitter // Three Hard-and-Fast Tips to Re(brand) on Twitter. Enjoy.
Simple but important information about social media... Nice topic.
Now a days once you register a domain, you should make pages for your company. Also before registering for domain, check the social media profiles if you are getting the page names. This is critical. We could not get Google Plus Page name for our site Oshopindia.com , As such we found that there is no one with this name but still we didnot get it. So we had to make it Oshopindia fans. This creates problem when people search on google as our company's google plus page doesnot appear in front pages.
Definitely! Start those plans early rather than later.
I understand your point, erica... and I'm sure that a lot of smart people got involved
Thanks for posting such an amazing post. It is really a helpful post and I guess that most of the individuals who are new in social media will take a great help from this.
Hi everyone
I also want to introduce a new blog
This is an interesting blog. Enough time to check this blog.