Is it that difficult? I got @kyan released for my company after several years of inactivity through a simple request, although I suppose it helped that we also own kyan.com and could prove we were actively branding ourselves as Kyan.

Do you hold the trademark? I've found they're unwilling to listen unless you can back it up with a registered trademark.

I don’t believe we hold any registered trademark. We’d been branding ourselves as simply Kyan for over 5 years before gaining the Twitter handle, although our registered company name is Kyanmedia (which was our previous handle). The account had a few followers and a profile picture uploaded, but either had never tweeted or was private.

How did you start the process?

I actually filled in the trademark form ( https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/to... ) even though we were just branded as Kyan and not officially trademarked as such. I seem to recall from the help documentation somewhere that an account that hasn’t tweeted in the last six months is more likely to be up for grabs in this way, although I can’t find that reference now. Either way a couple of confirmations were all it took to move from @kyanmedia to @kyan.

I don't think they've introduced any process. Until then the account has to be truly inactive and you have to know someone at Twitter