Quick Tips re Usernames

When you sign up for Twitter for the first time, you are asked to enter:
(1) "Full name" such as Fred Smith or Driving Business
(2) "Username" such as fredsmith23 or drivingbusiness

The username is significant for 3 reasons:
(a) It appears at the start of every tweet you make, and is therefore the main name people see
(b) Your account can be found using www.twitter.com/username
(c) It is also the username you use to login to Twitter and associated services

The username can be up to 15 letters or numbers, without spaces. The only special character permitted is the underscore as in fred_smith.

You can use a mix of upper and lower case characters, e.g. fredsmith23, FREDSMITH23 or FredSmith23. This username will appear in tweets exactly as entered.

But for other purposes such as login, the case is ignored. All these 3 variants of fredsmith23 could be used to login to the same account. This means that every username is unique, ignoring any differences in case. So once someone has registered fredsmith23, the case variants are not available to be used by any other users.

You can change the username at any time, as long as the new name is available. But beware - older tweets found by Twitter searches will still show the old username. Anyone clicking on the old username will not be redirected to the new username account. So worth getting the username right at the outset, or before you've made many tweets.