Three Reasons to Change Your Screen Name on Twitter

I hope you find this post both humorous and helpful. Without more introduction, please enjoy my reasoning.

The first situation when you might want to change you screen name is if you were drunk or high when you picked your screen name and it has some really crude and offensive meaning when that's really just not your normal personality. I'm assuming that if you did this, then you don't have many followers yet. While it seems like there are people out there who manage to have large numbers of followers and are really crude and offensive, they have to be consistently that way. So, if your name isn't true to who you are, you should change it. And, if you don't have many followers anyway, it won't hurt much to do so.

Second, if the mafia is after you and you think that changing your screen name might make it harder for them to find you. Now, seriously, if someone is trying to hunt you down and take your life, you might want to just have your twitter account deleted all together and don't create another one. But, if you just can't get twitter out of your mind, at least don't use your real name or picture on your profile.

The third case is if you are into doing things that most people would think just mean you are completely crazy, like street preaching, and you want it to take a while for people to figure it out. I'm not suggesting that you need to hide your true nature from people. On the contrary, even if you are a street preacher, that's ok. I love street preaching and care a great deal for other street preachers. But, if you want people other than just your street preaching friends to read what you write, then you might want to pick a screen name that doesn't turn people off before they ever even read what you've written. Of course, if you start out using a screen name like @strt_evangelist (like I did), you aren't going reach a very large audience. Most people (even those who consider themselves Christians) don't like street preachers. At the same time, the goal is to get your message out to as many people as you can.  Therefore, if you can keep people reading long enough to get something out of what you've written, everyone will be better off.

Clearly, none of these will apply to the majority of people, but you can understand why someone in any of the above situations would want to change their screen name. Sometimes it is good to not have people recognize you, and sometimes it isn't. For example, if you have street preacher friends that don't know you REALLLY well, but you still want them to be able to figure out who you are, the whole name change thing will be a little risky. I have one friend on twitter who quit following me after I changed my name. When I asked him about it he said, "nothing personal, we follow those who post Christian, Bible & evangelism related tweets & love street preachers & evangelists."

I'm sure everyone understands that just changing your name doesn't suddenly change who it is that you care for or love. I fully expect everyone realizes that you can change your bio without changing the content of your tweets. Now, I've recently broadened the content of my tweets in order to (hopefully) attract a larger audience to reading Bible verses and evangelism related tweets. However, when you change your name, sometimes people just can't tell who you are any more and so you risk misunderstandings and some people will fall away.

Hopefully some readers will get something out of my experiences and can avoid losing friends they care about.  Now, it may be that the benefits outweigh the risks, but be careful and try to pick a good name early on in your twitter career so that you can minimize the damages a name change can cause.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your feedback!

@DaveDerPunkt