by: AskPat 575 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 575 of “Ask Pat”. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
Okay, here's today's question from Diana.
Diana: Hi Pat. My name is Diana and I am a new entrepreneur. I just bought my first web domain this year and I wanted to say that your site and your podcast have my go-to for what to do next. Thanks for all you do. My question is, as a new business, should I go ahead and reserve my business name on all social and other platforms and media sites, even if I do not plan to use them at this time? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this so early in my business?
Thanks for your time and I hope to hear from you soon. Bye. Bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey Diana, thank you so much for the question today. And first of all, congratulations on your brand new business. I think that's really cool. This is a smart question to ask because when you're starting a business, there is obviously a lot steps. You can't always get to all of the social media platforms at the start, and you shouldn't. You should only focusing on one or maybe two at most, because if you divide all of your attention across all of them, none of them are going to work for you in the favor that you want them to.
So are you supposed to actually reserve those social media handles or user names before you even use them? I would encourage you to do that. The reason is because I've built businesses where I forget to do that, and because people see that this new business is there and that social media handle hasn't been taken yet, they'll take it for you. That's happened many times. It's happened with Will It Fly? Somebody took the Will It Fly? book on Twitter and then started to use it without my permission. Now they were using it to promote the book, and they were just using it because they were a fan of what I'd done and really liked the book and wanted to spread the word.
But you want to keep control of your name, so I would recommend that if possible, go out there and find those social media handles on all those different platforms Twitter, Facebook, Anchor, Snapchat, Periscope well that syncs up with Twitter. A lot of them sync up with Twitter, which is why Twitter is fairly important. Now that's going to be tough for some of you who try and find the social media handles and they are already taken. If they are already taken, there are a few things you can do.
The first thing I would do, on Twitter especially, and even on Facebook, if it seems like those pages are inactive and they haven't been taken care of for a while, you can go and try your best. It doesn't always happen, but I've been successful once and unsuccessful once with trying to get a user name that has been taken that hasn't been used for a while. I did this with FoodTruckr, and you just reach out to Twitter or you reach out to Facebook using their help or support. Just hope for the best. Honestly, it's kind of just based on luck. You can sometimes get those social media handles that are there, they are taken, but they are inactive.
Now the other part of that is if it is active and there is somebody on there but you really, really want that user name. Well, there is no harm in reaching out and seeing if that person will give it to you. Which may probably not happen, but you can also ask for it for sale, too. Now if you are going to be doing that, just make sure that you are careful with having this person, if they offer it to you. You might want to go through escrow to make that happen. There are some services out there where you can do that. I won't get into that right now, but just so that you're not paying this person money and they don't follow through with what they were supposed to do.
So getting somebody to sell their social media handle is something that's possible. But again, just want to make sure you are careful with that. But it has happened and it's worth trying if you really, really want that domain name. However, I will say that social media names or handles or user names don't necessarily have to exactly match straight up. For example, on Periscope I tried to get @PatFlynn on Periscope and I couldn't. It's gone, or somebody else took it. So I used @PatFlynnSPI. So if you're on Snapchat and you want to follow me there, it's PatFlynnSPI. Most other places it's just @PatFlynn. It's not a big deal as long as you just let people know, have the right links when you are promoting it, so on and so forth, and you'll be fine.
Now what are the disadvantages of having a social media platform that's there already? Well if people end up finding you there and you are not active on them, it will be like, “Oh, this person's not here.” Now to fix that on the ones that you aren't necessarily active on that you kind of reserved, it's kind of smart to just put a message on there that says, “Hey, this is my business.” And you set up the profiles and what not, but then you just say, “Hey, I'm mostly active on this platform here.” So having a little message there will show people that, “Yeah, I know I'm here and not very active, but if you go to this place instead, if you go to Twitter, if you go to Facebook, or whatever your primary social media platform becomes.” Then it becomes not like it's something that's left behind, but something that people know you just reserved because that's what you did.
So Diana, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for asking today. Because of that I'm going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question on the show. For anybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank those of you who have already picked up the audio book for Will It Fly? Again, that's available at WillItFlyBook.com. You can get it through Audible as well.
I appreciate your guys. Thank you so much for listening in. And as always I like to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Charles Swindle. “Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.” Totally.
Cheers. Take care. I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.