How to Protect Your Twitter Reputation

The first step to protecting your Twitter reputation issomeone was kind enough to tweet that I should
to be careful what you retweet. For example, you seetweet @spam, which I did. And, luckily, within minutes
a tweet with a headline that sounds so worthwhile tothe impersonator account was suspended.
share with your followers that you are tempted toThen there's hacking to take over your account and
simply retweet without even clicking through to look atsend out emails to your followers as if from you:
the post or article.This happens often on Twitter. The tip-off is usually
Okay, you may not have time to read the post orgetting a reply tweet, and the tweet says something
article now. But you must click through to be sure thatsimilar to "Is this a photo of you?" with a link.
the article is actually about what has been tweetedNow I don't know what happens when you click that
and not, in fact, a sales page for some product thatlink, because I don't. What I do instead is click on the
you do not want to appear to be promoting.person's Twitter username and see if he/she has
Or let's say you read a tweet with valuable informationrecently tweeted an apology for someone having
without a link. But you don't recognize the personhacked his/her site.
tweeting (you can't recognize every follower onceIf I don't see any such tweets, I will send a DM if the
your followers get to a certain point).person is following me. If not, I will politely tweet a public
Click on the person's Twitter username to check outreply to the person saying something such as: Your
the person. You want to be sure that you are notTwitter account appears to have been hacked
retweeting a person whose Twitter profile is - howbecause I got a tweet from you that you probably
should I say this? - less than polite.didn't send.
How to protect your Twitter reputation from hackersOften I get a reply tweet thanking me for this info and
Now we come to the real problem with protectingsaying that the person is taking care of the problem:
your reputation on Twitter. You can do everything right• The first thing to do is change your password.
in your own account and still be hacked.• The second thing is to tweet a public apology to
Your profile info can be scraped:people about the bogus tweet and stating you've
This means that all the info in your profile (except thetaken care of the problem.
hot link) - including your real name - is used by• The third thing to do is to "pay it forward" by
someone else with his/her Twitter username.warning anyone else whose Twitter account you
In other words, the person is impersonating you andnotice has been hacked.
putting his/her hot link in place of yours.(The link tweeted from your hacked account may go,
This happened to me, and I learned about it when I gotfor example, to someone's sales page or to a page
an email notification that I was following myself onset up for phishing - an attempt to get more sensitive
Twitter.information from you.)
Luckily the replaced hot link was to a page onTo protect your Twitter password, be careful when
Amazon and not to whatever, although I admit I wasyou give third-party applications permission to use your
so shocked I forgot to notice what kind of book onTwitter login information. Be sure the third-party
Amazon the link went to.application is a reputable one and not set up primarily
What to do in this case? First I blocked the person'sto capture your password.
username. Then I hunted around Twitter until I finallyTwitter can be a powerful tool in your online marketing
found Twitter's impersonation policy, and I followed thetoolkit, and it is up to you to protect that tool with
steps for submitting a ticket to Twitter asking for help.common sense and monitoring.
But to cover my bases, I also tweeted for help. And