Your Name on Fifty-Three Other Sites

There is a version of your name on the internet that you did not put there, and a casting director searching for you will find it before they find anything you made. Social / Presence in your control panel checks 53 sites for a username and tells you which of them already have it.

You type a handle, it works through the list one site at a time, and each result appears as it lands. It is under Social, and you will find it at Social / Presence. It is a premium feature.

Two reasons to run it, and they are opposites

The first is to claim. Pick the handle you want to be known by and find out where it is still free. Consistency is worth more than cleverness here: somebody who finds you on one platform and guesses the same name on another should land on you. If the name you want is gone in half the places, it is better to know that on the day you choose it than three years and two hundred followers later.

The second is to find what is already there. Most actors have accounts they made at nineteen and forgot. A dormant profile with four photographs and a username you would not choose today is not neutral, because it still ranks for your name. You cannot delete what you cannot remember, and this is a fast way to remember.

How to read the three answers

• Username exists. Something lives at that address. It is not necessarily you, and that is the point of looking.
• Username doesn't exist. The site answered plainly that there is nothing there. That one is free.
• Site didn't respond clearly. The site blocked the check or answered oddly. It is not a verdict either way, and the honest thing is to open that one yourself.

The list runs from the places you would expect, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, to a long tail that matters more than it looks: Medium, Patreon, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Behance, About.me, Gravatar. The tail is where forgotten accounts tend to sit, because nobody remembers signing up.

What it does not tell you

It checks whether a page exists at that address. It does not check whether the person there is you, and on a common name a good number of them will not be. Treat a result as somewhere to look rather than as an answer.

It is also a reading taken at one moment. A name that is free today is free today. If you want it, the check is not the work. Registering it is.

Then do the boring part

Pick one handle. Use it everywhere you can get it. Where you cannot, get as close as you can and stay consistent about the near miss rather than inventing a different one each time. Put the accounts you actually keep on your website, and leave the rest off it, because a link to a profile you abandoned in 2019 is worse than no link at all.