Every one in ten Twitter user change their handle to keep up with the trends, according to a study conducted by a government-run institute in India. The research noted that users, who keep changing on their handle attract more users compared to those who stick to their handle on the micro-blogging site, according to a report from Economictimes.Indiatimes.
Changing username not always help
According to Paridhi Jain and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru of the Delhi-based Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, users keep on changing their handles to match the latest trend. Both the researchers drew this conclusion after observing activities of 87 lakh users. For instance, a user who changed the username up to 113 times in 133 days attracted total of 20,800 followers, follows 1,616 people and had a total of 13,800 tweets until Wednesday.
Giving free hand to users in changing their username allows them to adopt the changing attributes, likes and dislikes along with interests. Not always, but at times such username could create an unexpected consequence such as not showing up in the search by others. There have been cases where the users have seen declining followers due to non-search ability and connectivity to a user profile. Most users do not think about the followers when they decide to change their username or handles.
Username of the user reveals the identity. A media professional used only initials as username because he does not want to interact with the world. A user can reveal what he or she thinks in 140 characters over Twitter. The user with a long username gives lesser space to write about the content and one with a shorter username allows for larger content, hashtags or URLs.
Twitter offers customized username
In 2013, Twitter emerged as the most popular site with around 200 million users posting 400 million tweets per day. There are hardly any users who repeat the name that they used in the past. However, like Facebook and few other social networking website, Twitter does not restrict the number of times a user can change the username.
Twitter can offer customized username suggestions to the user by tracking the past usernames and thus create a unified social footprint of a user by locating the username on OSNs. “Tracking a username and user profiles who choose a particular username can help in correlating user profiles to a single real-world person,” noted the study’s authors
