Social media sites tend to get excellent search engine visibility. But as Loren Baker notes on the Daily SEO Tip, this can be a double-edged sword. If a third party other than your firm reserves your firm's name as a profile on a site like Twitter, they can do tremendous damage to your brand. As an individual develops a following, they can spread negative, even misleading information about your firm.
The solution is to be proactive and secure your firm's brand across key social media sites. Otherwise you risk letting your competition, an affiliate marketer, or some jokester take control of your brand on these platforms.
Baker refers readers to a site called CheckUserNames.com, which will help you determine if your brand name is taken on a social media site. If it has, you can request from the social media sites that control your brand name be taken from the username squatter and handed over to your company. Most social media companies, Twitter being one of them, can be quite cooperative in taking care of this for you, because they do not want brands being misrepresented inside their network. While we don't want to dispense legal advice (especially to lawyers!), we suspect trademark law and other areas of IP law may offer precedent in this area.
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