How to Reserve Your WhatsApp Username Right Now

So, WhatsApp have just released a brand new feature called usernames, where you can now get in touch with people by typing in a username rather than their phone number. Here's how you can grab your username now, before someone else takes it. And if you're not seeing these options yet, I'll show you some ways that might help get that later on in the video.

So, to get started, we're going to open up WhatsApp and tap onto our profile page. Then, we're going to go onto our account settings, and you should see the option in the middle here for usernames.

Now, at this point, we've got a few different ways that we can use the usernames feature. And it's actually quite clever, because what WhatsApp are doing is, if you've got a Facebook or an Instagram account, you can actually grab that username and it's basically reserved it for you already. So, the chances are that's probably going to be the name you want to use on WhatsApp as well. And you can simply tap onto there.

I'll use Facebook in my example. And then you can connect your WhatsApp account to those other accounts. For me, I'm going to tap on Connect here. And then it will link them all together. And now you can see it's found that username for me.Now actually, JTW48 is a really old username that I set up a long time ago on Facebook, and I want to change that to my actual name, but we can do that too. So this username is safe, this one's reserved, but I want to change it to something a bit more modern, a bit more current. So I'm going to tap onto Edit in the top corner. From here, we can then change that username. And you can type in any username you want, and you'll see straight away if it's taken or if it's available.

And my tip here is do this really quick, because the quicker you do it, the more chance you've got of getting your username. It's a bit like when Gmail first launched all those years ago, and now all the good names have gone. I'm going to type in Jacob Woolcock and, yeah, that's available. So I'll tap on there, and that's now my username on WhatsApp.

Of course, right now you could now add me and send me a message, and that's no good. I don't want the whole world doing that, or the 12 people that have watched this video, whatever it is. But instead, we can add a PIN code, and this is quite cool. When you're then sharing your WhatsApp username in the future and you're stood face to face with someone, it will prompt them for the PIN code as well. Unless they type that in, they can't message you, they can't connect. It's like a little safeguard that's now in place for you. I can regenerate this again, and you best believe I'm going to do it again, but now I'll film this video.

But some of you are watching this and you've probably not seen that usernames feature yet. It's not on your account. And there's a couple of things that I did to make it show up on mine, which might work for you. So, the first one is go to the App Store on your phone and make sure your app is fully up to date. This works on the latest version of WhatsApp. And then, if that is the case, simply swipe up, quit the app completely, and reopen it. I did this a few times this afternoon, and then it showed up for me on the third restart. This may not work for everyone, and I'm sure it's rolling out gradually, but do check in every day, and you should get it working in no time.And now you've done that, I think you're going to love this QuickTip next.