Skip to content

My Name Is Too Long for Twitter

When I got married a couple of years ago, I spent a fair amount of time deciding whether to change my name. “Valentino” isn’t a bad name, and I’d never really thought I’d want to change it. But I happen to kind of like my husband, and I thought taking his name in some way was a nice thing to do. It made both of us happy. I’m aware that my name is long and annoying — 24 letters (four of them capitalized) plus a hyphen — but it’s my name.

Unfortunately, it’s not my name on Twitter. It’s too long.

Now, I can understand why my username on Twitter can’t be more than 15 characters. Usernames are added to outgoing messages, and they’re used within messages in retweets and so forth. You don’t want your entire 140-character limit on messages being taken up by a username. But what gets me is that real names on Twitter also have character limits. The restriction is raised to 20 characters (including spaces) to allow for people with longer names, but my name goes beyond even that. I’d imagine that many of Twitter’s female users might be known by two surnames as well. Plus, there are several nationalities with names that would easily test Twitter’s limits.

There’s a practical issue here — the ease of finding people in the Twitterverse. On Facebook, I can search for friends whether I use their married names, maiden names or even nicknames. On Twitter’s people search, which is notoriously problematic, I can be easily found with a query for “jenvalentino” or “Jennifer Valentino,” and that’s about it. If you search for anything involving “DeVries,” or even for “Jen Valentino,” you don’t find me, even though I list my full name in Twitter’s little “bio” section. It’s not that I think I have legions of fans who are dying to follow my anemic Twitter feed. But for a social-media service, this is a user-experience problem. Shouldn’t Twitter be facilitating my search for relevant people to follow?

Published inPersonalTech

9 Comments

  1. Pat Pat

    Just encountered this issue whilst setting up a Twitter account for a client’s business… Absolutely silly and will now deduct from brand impact.

    • Agreed. Our name, Seven Stones Productions will not fit and it will impact brand image. Sitting here right now struggling on how to shorten it.

  2. i have this exact problem, as well. 🙁 you’d think that twitter would catch on to the reality that this is issue is just going to grow as more and more women choose to hyphenate their names…

  3. I’m having this same issue right now. I have no idea how to shorten my name and still feel like I’m associating myself with my brand.

  4. I wanted to put my business on Twitter: Wretched Elegance. It’s ONE letter too long!! >:(

  5. Micah Cowsik-Herstand Micah Cowsik-Herstand

    Seven years later and it hasn’t changed!

    I recently added my wife’s surname to mine upon marriage as well (men can do that, too!) and at 21 characters, my name is now too long for Twitter. 🙁

  6. Russell Damerell-Moss Russell Damerell-Moss

    2017 and Twitter still consider my name too long for them. Rather annoying.

  7. Mathias Beaulieu-Duncan Mathias Beaulieu-Duncan

    How is twitter allow only 20 char for full name. This is not even enough for first name or last name from database standards, how can twitter fuck up that much.

  8. What would you recommend for a business to do if their username is too long for twitter?

Leave a Reply to Micah Cowsik-Herstand Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *