Redirecting One Twitter Account To Another Options

[Andy_Seo]

Hi all,

This might seem like a awkward request - but I thought it might spark some good debate.

Say you wanted a Twitter account with the following - twitter.com/blue_banana

However, the above was available so you setup twitter.com/blue_apple

You accumulate 1000 followers, then find out that someone in your organisation has got hold of the 'blue_banana' twitter account and wants to set that up as the default Twitter page - is there anything that can be done to redirect the old page to the new page? Or do you simply have to update your tweets showing that you have moved?

Cheers!

[Randy]

Good question Andy.

I don't know of a way to set up any sort of redirect on the Twitter pages. They don't give you that kind of control over the page, and for good reason. So I don't think that would be possible.

Whether there's a way through Twitter to merge two accounts together is one I don't know the answer to. I wouldn't think it would be that hard for them to do from the technical side of things. But the checks and balances required to make sure nobody was taking advantage (eg would they require the admin email address to be the same on both accounts? Or could come up with some other way to verify account ownership?) might be fraught with difficulties.

[Jill]

I don't believe so.

[ycui]

I am running into the exact same situation as Andy posted. Does anybody has any furture update on this? Is this durable? or any work around? Do we have to maintain 2 accounts with 2 sets of followers? Any comments/suggesions are appricated!

[Randy]

I've not heard anything new on the subject since Andy originally asked the question ycui. I do however know of a couple of people who have been able to merge accounts of theirs by contacting Twitter Support. I didn't ask how difficult it was or what hoops they needed to jump through before it could be done.

If you're already logged into Twitter you can send a help request to twitter support via this page. And by all means let us know how it works out so others can benefit from the experience!

[ycui]

I actually did send a request to Twitter Support. It has been over a week now, but I haven't heard anything back from them except the auto-reply email with my ticket number.

[Andy_Seo]

Hi ycui,

No I wasn't able to. I had to create a new account and place a link from the older Twitter to announce the move. The majority of followers did actually update their records - but sadly, as Randy states, there still isn't any redirect possible from one Twitter account to another.

Edit - Just to confirm the new account already existed (I didn't create a new one as I could have done this through the settings had the name been available).