CNN Takes Over Twitter Account – Hopefully This Will Be A Rare Exception

Competing with Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) for one million followers on Twitter, CNN has made a remarkable move to acquire an existing account (@cnnbrk). Outside the US probably hard to understand – with less than one million Twitter users in most countries – the topic hit the media already big time.

Ashton Kutcher and CNN are currently followed by the most subscribers on Twitter, but the @cnnbrk account wasn’t even fed with content by the US news channel so far. It belonged to a private person, who did not have any relation with CNN. The account owner was now approached by CNN and invited to negotiations. Allegedly the “owner” has been paid up to one million dollar, which is denied by CNN. But it remains unclear whether Twitter names can be sold at all. According to Twitter’s support website that’s not possible.

Think about it: one million followers are more than 10% of all Twitter members and if this mark is soon to be reached by a couple of brands, it will be a pretty amazing number of people following a single brand…

This example shows that well positioned Twitter accounts can be a huge asset and can influence the brand reputation substantially. As such each brand should pay attention to use their most important keywords as Twitter channels or at least “reserve” them, as they would do with domain names, if they don’t want to end up in a legal and/ or financial fight to claim back their brand names from Twitter (or whomever).

As said in the headline, I really hope this will be a rare exception and will not lead us to thousands of “fake” Twitter accounts, just because people hope to make money out of it (as seen before with domain names).

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