Twitter id collected via Social App is meaningless (?) number

[Diedert_Debussc]

I added a Social Button on our webinar registration confirmation page, to promote social sharing of our webinars while collecting social profile data as well.

But in a test run I now see that the "Marketo Social Twitter Id." field (which should contain the Twitter handle) is overwritten by number (of many digits) which seems meaningless to me. Shouldn't the Social Button automatically retrieve the Twitter handle once the user has given permission?

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Diedert,

Twitter IDs are valid--they're just Twitter's internal view of an account instead of the username, which can change. For example, I have the amazingly even Twitter ID 44990000 even though my handle is @cougrimes.

TweeterID - Twitter ID and username converter offers a converter, as well as Twitter's API itself. Not sure why Marketo chose to record ID and not at least also capture the username as well in terms of design.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

Username can be changed at will by the user, so it's not unique.  I'm guessing that's why.

[Casey_Grimes]

Oh, of course--I guess I would have just expected a username capture at time of recording in addition to the ID, mostly to prevent confusion.

[Diedert_Debussc]

Thanks Courtney, this is really helpful, the link to the converter helps.

Since we're collecting twitter handles via forms as well, I think I'll have to create a user-defined form field "twitter handle" to distinguish between the ID Twitter collects.