What can Instagram name generator teach us?
Instagram is an essential marketing tool for many modern businesses. In fact, quite a few businesses, particularly influencer accounts, start as personal Instagram accounts and then grow into a profit making machine.
The first barrier that many people experience when starting up their Instagram account is figuring out what their username should be. After all, their username is going to be one of the first things that prospective followers see about them, and first impressions last.
Although it sounds easy, picking a name is quite challenging. To get some inspiration, many Instagrammers have taken to Instagram username generators. These tools take a word or phrase as input and make up dozens of different names that the user can take verbatim or use as a jumping off point.
Here, we’re going to cover the importance of your Instagram name, the characteristics of a strong username, and how to come up with one. We’ll also review 14 different Instagram username generators that you can try out for yourself to come up with a great Instagram name.
How Important Is It To Have A Good Instagram Username?
Your Instagram username is an integral part of your branding, and you need to ensure that it represents your brand’s purpose and personality in some way. It will be some of the first exposure Instagrammers have to your brand, and you want to be sure that you make a good first impression.
Although a good Instagram username is definitely important, it’s not essential. As long as your Instagram username isn’t a disaster (think something truly offensive or disgusting), your username isn’t going to be the deciding factor in your success one way or another.
A unique Instagram name helps establish your brand identity, making it easier for followers to recognize and remember your account. It sets you apart from others and gives your profile a distinct personality.
For example, for businesses, having a unique Instagram name conveys professionalism and credibility. It shows that you’ve put thought into your online presence and reinforces your commitment to building a strong brand image.
Moreover, When users search for specific keywords or terms on Instagram, having a unique username can help your account stand out in search results. This can lead to increased visibility and exposure to potential followers.
Remember: you can always change your username down the line, so if you’re not sure what to call yourself yet, just pick something and run with it. It takes a while to build up a following, so if you choose a name and then change it after a few days, chances are very few people will notice.
Characteristics Of A Good Instagram Username
Chasing an objectively “good” username is a mistake. What works for one brand may not work for another. For example, a name that sounds aggressive, like rage_unleashed, may work perfectly well for a male fitness and bodybuilding account, but would perform terribly for a kawaii brand like Hello Kitty.
Instead, you should focus on finding a name that suits your brand’s personality and demographics. As long as your name does that, chances are that it will do just fine.
Make Sure It’s Readable
That said, there are some rules of thumb you should keep in mind. First and foremost, your name needs to be readable. For the most part, that means staying away from repeating and double letters.
For example, although a name like yuuuummm might make sense for a food brand, it’s hard to tell right away how many u’s and m’s there are, which makes it easy to misspell.
If you’re making an account for an individual, you may encounter double letters, like in the name Marilyn Norman, for example. On Instagram, this would appear as marilynnorman. Unfortunately, the double “n” in the middle makes it a bit hard to read.
To fix this, you can use underscores so that the username would become marilyn_norman — much easier to read. You can use this to make long names easier to read as well.
Avoid Too Many Numbers Or Symbols
Additionally, you’ll likely want to stay away from too many numbers and symbols (particularly x’s), i.e., xXangel_heart1111Xx, but this will depend on your target demographic.
No Nonsense
Finally, and this should go without saying: don’t make a nonsense name. For example, asdfiefjlasid13480 is not a good name. Not only is it nearly impossible to remember, but it’s going to make your account look like a fake spam account. Coming up with unique names that aren’t already taken can be hard, but this is not a good solution.
How To Come Up With A Good Instagram Username
The key to a good Instagram username is making one that encapsulates your brand’s mission and personality. In most cases, your Instagram username will simply be some variation of your brand’s name.
For example, if your brand name is Bob’s Famous Donuts, you can use bobsfamousdonuts as your Instagram name. If your business name is already taken on Instagram, you’ll have to get a bit more creative, perhaps trying something like bobsfamousdonutsinsta, bobs_famous_donuts, or even a more extreme variation, like donuts_by_bob.
However, if you haven’t come up with a brand name, the first step is to brainstorm what your brand is all about. Make a list of words that encapsulate your brand and have some fun with them. If you write down the words “yummy” and “delicious” to describe your food brand, you could try combining them to make a name like Yummilicious.
Whatever you choose, you should make sure that it expresses your brand’s personality, is somewhat memorable, and is easy to read.
However, if you’re stuck, or even if you just want to get a bit of inspiration, you can always try using an Instagram name or Ai generator.
How can AI (ChatGPT) be useful
ChatGPT can help generate ideas for unique usernames by providing suggestions based on your input. You can describe your interests, niche, or preferred style, and ChatGPT can generate relevant username ideas for you to consider.
You can interact with ChatGPT to refine your username ideas. By providing feedback on generated suggestions, ChatGPT can continue to offer more tailored recommendations until you find a rare username that suits your preferences.
ChatGPT can serve as a helpful tool in the brainstorming and ideation process for finding a rare Instagram username, offering creative input, and assisting you in generating unique and memorable options.
How to get a rare Instagram username
Getting a rare Instagram username can be quite challenging because many unique or desirable usernames are already taken due to the platform’s popularity. You must think outside the box and come up with unique combinations of words, numbers, or symbols that reflect your personality, brand, or niche.
Moreover, there are online tools and apps available that can generate random usernames for you. You can use these as inspiration or directly adopt one if you find it appealing. If you want to get a rare Instagram username with these tools, they are listed below.
The Top Instagram Name Generators
Picking a name for your Instagram account can be challenging. Luckily, some helpful software developers have made a bunch of tools that can generate names for you.
Let’s take a look at some of the best Instagram name generators around and see what they can do for you. To keep things uniform and easily comparable, we’re going to use the word “fitness” as our starting material for each of the Instagram username generators. Then, we’ll compare the results and the process.
1. Business Name Generator
The first thing you should know about Business Name Generator is that you should have an anti-virus installed if you’re using it. During our testing, it tried to open a new tab without our permission, which may have been attempting to download malware. Tread carefully.
As far as the functionality itself goes, it’s pretty straightforward: type in a word and click generate. Here’s what it returned for “fitness:”
The names generated were quite good: Fitzoid is catchy, Health Bark is unique, and Fit Conspiracy is pretty interesting as well.
2. LINGOJAM
In our testing, the LINGOJAM Instagram username generator didn’t work very well. It promised to deliver “a big pile of random Instagram name ideas.” At the very least, it did live up to the word “random”:
These names were almost completely nonsensical with very little relation to the keyword we entered. We’d recommend using a different Instagram username generator.
3. Name-Generator.org.uk
Name-Generator.org.uk is designed for usernames in general, not just Instagram. Out of the generators we looked into, it goes the most in-depth. Here’s what it asks for (our inputs are in parentheses):
- First, middle, and last name (Joe Mary Smith)
- Your gender (male)
- Your year of birth (1989)
- Two adjectives to describe yourself (healthy, young)
- A location (New York)
- An occupation (coach)
- And something you like (fitness)
- Whether you allow underscores or dots
It also allows you to generate a completely random username without any inputs of your own.
Here are some of the names it came up with:
Overall, not very good. Some were particularly bad, like joe0xtkpiq45ulaey2n. Definitely a pass.
4. NordPass Username Generator
NordPass is a password management tool, like LastPass and Dashlane. Its username generator is designed to help you pick safe usernames that are less susceptible to hacking, not for branding purposes.
To generate a name, all you need to do is enter a word. You can then set some parameters like the length of the name, whether you allow random characters, if you want to use Leetspeak (replacing letters with numbers, like h3110 for hello), and if you want to keep your keyword at the end.
Here are the usernames it generated for “fitness” with the category set to sports:
One nice feature is that it lets you check whether the username is taken on several different sites and apps, like so:
Unfortunately, Instagram isn’t included, and the usernames aren’t very good.
5. Jimpix.co.uk
Jimpix.co.uk is another simple username generator with very few options. All you need to do is enter a word and select a category (we chose sports). You can also select whether you want to “Show Bells and Whistles,” which allows the generator to reverse the word you entered, take chunks of it, and do all sorts of other random permutations. We did not enable it for this test.
Overall, these usernames weren’t too bad. Infielderfitness has a nice ring to it, and fitnessforward is quite catchy as well. The latter has already been taken on Instagram, but the first one is still available.
6. SpinXO Instagram Name Generator
Like name-generator.co.uk, SpinXO’s name generator takes several different inputs, including your name, hobbies, a description of yourself, things you like, important words, and letters or numbers.
Here are our results:
If you don’t like any of the names it gives you, you can hit the “SPIN!” button again to get some more names.
Most of these names were not very good, but AerobicsAeon isn’t bad. John Brawn is also a decent name if you’re looking for a pseudonym.
7. How To Start An LLC Instagram Name Generator
How To Start An LLC’s Instagram name generator tool is simple and straightforward: enter a keyword and hit generate. If you want, you can also enter a location, but this is optional.
Here’s what it gave us:
In total, it returned six names, all of which were quite bad, especially seaworthiness and fittingness. Definitely not one of the best we’ve seen.
8. Mookychick
Mookychick’s Instagram name generator is the simplest of all the ones we’ve looked at so far. In fact, it’s so simple that you don’t even get to input a keyword — all you do is select how many names you’d like (up to 20), and it will generate them for you.
Some of these names are interesting, but they all align with Mookychick’s branding, and it would be nearly impossible to find a suitable username for your own brand by sorting through these.
9. Nitreo
Nitreo’s username generator gives you five categories to fill out:
- A choice between random, verbs and adjectives, verbs or adjectives, only adjectives, only verbs, or none
- The type of adjectives you want (color, size, feelings, etc.)
- A seemingly random category with choices like male names, female names, sports, food, and animals
- A custom prefix
- A custom noun
Unfortunately, Nitreo requires you to give them your email address to get your names, so we don’t recommend it.
10. Names4Brands
This is definitely one of the worst username generators we’ve tried so far. Very little about this site makes sense, whether it’s the nearly incomprehensible tagline, “Jackpot For Every Trigger,” or the usernames it suggests.
Names4Brands lets you make usernames based on three different words. If you choose the “Custom” setting, you can input two words along with either the setting to end with a vowel or end with a vowel and character.
The usernames we got back were all unusable:
The custom setting was no better:
You can skip over this generator with no regrets.
11. Nameboy
Nameboy doesn’t do what it says it will. Although the site states that it will provide you with brand names, it actually gives you website names only. It’s also a very spammy site — as soon as you hit generate, it hits you with a popup asking you to sign up for hosting with Bluehost.
Here are the website names we got:
If you take off the .com at the end, some of these could be usable for Instagram. Giant Fitness isn’t bad, and Empire Fitness is pretty good too. However, both of these are already taken on Instagram.
12. Username-Generator.org
Username-Generator.org takes one input: a word. You can also select your preferred length. Here are the names it gave us:
None of these names really stood out to us, although perhaps with a few more goes it would give some interesting names. The best ones were SyntaxFitness and ManicFitness, both of which are already taken on Instagram.
13. Namegenerator.biz
Namegenerator.biz doesn’t offer an Instagram name generator, so we used its Twitter name generator instead. The tool asks for a prefix and a suffix, which will become the beginning and end of your username.
Interestingly enough, this generator only makes one name at a time, so you have to keep clicking generate to make new names.
Here are some of the ones we got:
We didn’t find anything to be usable.
14. Sassy Captions
Sassy Captions’s name generator is specifically designed for Instagram. Unfortunately, it doesn’t perform any better than the other generators we’ve looked into.
It asks for one word and gives you a choice between generating a username based on that word or a completely random username. Neither of the results were good.
We would not recommend this Instagram username generator.
The Bottom Line
Choosing an Instagram username isn’t easy. Unfortunately, Instagram name generators don’t make the search much easier. Very few of the generators we tried gave us names that were even remotely usable, and the ones that did were either taken already or came from generators that seemed to have safety concerns.
Overall, you can’t expect to rely on Instagram name generators. It’s possible you’ll get something great by chance, but it’s not a quick fix. That said, if you just need a little inspiration, Instagram username generators may be able to spark your creative juices a bit and suggest a new direction you never would have thought of.
Out of the ones we tried, Jimpix.co.uk was overall the best. Business Name Generator generated the best names, but we are concerned with its safety profile and the threat of getting a virus or malware.
If you’re short on ideas, Instagram name generators can be worth a try, but ultimately your name will have to come from your own imagination.
Author
Kaye Sitchon is all about Instagram tools and services that help brands level up their game. She’s got a knack for finding the best resources to make Instagram marketing easier and more effective. When Kaye’s not exploring new tools, she’s likely planning her next travel adventure or diving into a great book!
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