In what seemed like a fun gesture, the San Diego Padres changed their @Padres Twitter handle to @Madres to celebrate Mother’s Day.
That’s no big deal; changing a handle to a different one lets you retain your following, and it’s for a good cause. The one thing you should absolutely do, though, if you’re a professional team with 400,000 Twitter followers, is to make sure Twitter knows to lock down the original handle. Or even create a holding account for the @Padres handle, so you can easily switch back to it.
The Padres did not do that.
Ricky managed to hold on for a few hours before the Padres switched back:
It’s tough to say where the breakdown was but this does seem like a logical set of assumptions:
The @Padres handle is now frozen, so it appears someone finally flipped the correct switch. But not before Ricky managed to have the @Padres handle for a few hours.
Ricky Padilla the
— Dave Guido (@Devoguido) May 12, 2019
https://twitter.com/kellyawallace/status/1127610620080197637
So, now everything seems like it’s back in order, although there are still a few replies to @Padres that direct to Ricky’s account. It was a great example of one of the few purely fun things on Twitter: brands and/or celebrities having their plans foiled by random people.