Now, before you answer the question it is not as cut and dry as you may think. In fact, nobody is 100 percent sure of the answer. There are few laws and decided court cases that can help reach a definitive answer. In the meantime, the amount of lawsuits being filed is increasing as employers and former employees fight over Twitter handles and followers.
When looking at Twitter ownership, the function of the site is crucial. What is the primarily reason for the site? Is it to share personal information and occasionally pass along a company article? Or, is it to drive up sales, marketing, branding, etc. for a company? If the site is decidedly for business, the company has a much stronger claim on ownership.
However, a recent example does cast a shadow over the ownership dispute. In September of 2011, a company called PhoneDog Media filed a suit against their former editor-in-chief Noah Kravitz claiming that he unlawfully changed his Twitter handle (name) from @PhoneDog_Noah to @noahkravitz when he left the company. In their claim, PhoneDog said Kravitz owned $340,000 for all of the followers associated with the account ($2.50 for each of the 17,000 followers when he left per month for 8 months).
The question being bounced around in the courts is does PhoneDog have a claim to that Twitter account when Kravitz created and maintained the handle entirely by himself?
To reduce the risks of a messy legal battle like PhoneDog–v–Kravitz, companies need to make their social media policies very clear about their intentions of who owns the content and followers from the beginning. A best practice is to enter into separate agreements with those employees who have Twitter handles and followers that the company claims to own, making sure everybody is on the same page. Leave nothing to assumption or ambiguity in your social media policies.
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