Last week, I highlighted several tips for protecting your Twitter account from hackers. Along with stealing personal information and compromising your company’s data, hackers can pose a threat to your brand’s reputation if they post offensive or spam-filled tweets during the time that they hijack your account.
While you may think that hackers mostly target celebrities and accounts with massive followings – Justin Bieber’s Twitter was recently broken into, with the hacker posting in Indonesian and causing confusion among Justin’s 50 million followers – personal and business accounts are also at risk.
Here are a couple of additional tips for how to keep your practice’s Twitter account safe from break-ins, as well as how to recover your online presence after a hacking:
Minimize third party access. You may have noticed that some apps require that you give them permission to access your social media accounts in order to post on your behalf or read your Tweets. When you authorize these accounts to access your info, you’re putting your social media account’s security at risk. Be very careful of what apps you grant access too, and check your security settings to revoke apps’ access.
Do damage control. Besides using your stolen password to mine for private data, a hacker can damage your brand’s reputation by changing your password – which effectively locks you out of your own account, at least temporarily – and hijacking your account by posting their own tweets. These can be offensive or spam, but in either case, it can cause your account to lose followers or get blocked.
When Justin Bieber’s Twitter account password was compromised, the hacker posting several rogue tweets and links to spam. Once they regained access, Justin’s Twitter account management tweeted a brief explanation and warning about the hacking, saying “that link from earlier. dont click it. virus. going to erase this now. spread the word. thanks.”
Acknowledge and explain. If your business account is hacked, acknowledging what happened, explain the circumstances and let your followers know that any offensive, derogatory or spam-filled tweets were not posted by your company. Delete any of the hacker’s tweets and check your direct message exchanges to make sure that the hacker didn’t contact any of your followers that way.
For more advice on how to keep your account safe, click here to read Twitter Tips: Social Media Security .
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