'Is social media quietly doing the marketing for .uk?
A quick look around (I'd love some data, maybe something we'll work on in-house) makes something obvious.
A huge number of UK brands, creators, shops, studios and ateliers now run handles like:
@brand.uk
@name_uk
@studio.uk
@atelier.uk
The assumption is they do it for handle availability reasons, but the effect is more interesting...
In my view, they are training the public to read .uk as a brand suffix.
Not technical.
Not domain-y.
by Brand.
British.
Legit.
Real-world.
Now add coherence.
When someone runs @brand.uk everywhere and owns brand.uk on the web, the identity locks.
Handle, site, search and mention all align. That alignment creates authority.
Compare that to:
@brand.uk
brand.co.uk
It works, but it breaks the spell.
Result? The public now intuitively expects:
@brand.uk → brand.uk
That’s where the spillage happens...
Social feeds may be teaching users what the 'real' address is meant to be.
Personal view, but .co.uk feels infrastructural. .uk feels like identity.
And, in a feed-first world, identity beats plumbing.
So .uk isn’t just being adopted. It’s being marketed, for free, by every platform that allows dots and underscores in usernames.
Not by Nominet.
By Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, etc.
Thoughts? I reckon there's an opportunity/opening for us to leverage...'
- Lucy, DomainPros.
A quick look around (I'd love some data, maybe something we'll work on in-house) makes something obvious.
A huge number of UK brands, creators, shops, studios and ateliers now run handles like:
@brand.uk
@name_uk
@studio.uk
@atelier.uk
The assumption is they do it for handle availability reasons, but the effect is more interesting...
In my view, they are training the public to read .uk as a brand suffix.
Not technical.
Not domain-y.
by Brand.
British.
Legit.
Real-world.
Now add coherence.
When someone runs @brand.uk everywhere and owns brand.uk on the web, the identity locks.
Handle, site, search and mention all align. That alignment creates authority.
Compare that to:
@brand.uk
brand.co.uk
It works, but it breaks the spell.
Result? The public now intuitively expects:
@brand.uk → brand.uk
That’s where the spillage happens...
Social feeds may be teaching users what the 'real' address is meant to be.
Personal view, but .co.uk feels infrastructural. .uk feels like identity.
And, in a feed-first world, identity beats plumbing.
So .uk isn’t just being adopted. It’s being marketed, for free, by every platform that allows dots and underscores in usernames.
Not by Nominet.
By Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, etc.
Thoughts? I reckon there's an opportunity/opening for us to leverage...'
- Lucy, DomainPros.
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