It’s a well known fact that your company name is important. Most entrepreneurs spend hours, if not days deliberating the most appropriate/coolest name, and lots of mid-large firms spend plenty of money marketing & promoting their names.

Which is why it surprises me as to the number of companies that don’t bother protecting their names online. If you haven’t already done it, go and get your company name setup as your username/page/whatever for Facebook/LinkedIN/Twitter/where-ever-else-your-clients-are. You’ll hardly look professional if someone else is operating your username & you’re left with something like “MyCompany01”. There is a process to reclaim infringing usernames on most sites, I’ve no idea how long it takes or how effective it is, but ask yourself, vs. 20 minutes of registration time – is that really the route you want to go? Really?

Most sites are pretty straight forward, Facebook is a little more complex – but HubSpot has a great article on how-to get your own Vanity URL for Facebook.

As an aside, protecting your name is important online & offline, registering a TradeMark under one category is cheap & worthwhile doing so if you’re about to make an investment into a business that hopes to have a brand or a name one day. It’s also helpful if you’re going to try and reclaim and infringing social-media name at a later date.