Twitter has a few unknown features that are available to businesses and other accounts that are managed by multiple people. One is called Teams and allows many people to perform regular actions on the account without permissions to change settings. This and other things are some ways Twitter is improving cyber safety for its users.
No joke, Mark Zuckerberg, the king of social media, had his Twitter account hacked. And so have a lot of pretty important people. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was hacked. NASA had its Kepler account hacked, and fake pictures show Uranus with a ring around it. Tesla Motors was hacked, and though we all wish it were true, the free cars offered for calling were a scam. I don’t know if it get’s worse than being the CFO of Twitter and having your own account hacked, but that’s what happened to Anthony Noto.
Big names make for big targets, but anyone could be a target, and it could be really detrimental to business. Just recently, Salem State University in near Boston had its Twitter account hacked the night before its graduation commencement, and the racist comments negatively impacted the ceremonies. The same could happen to you or your business if you don’t take a few special measures.
There are many ways to better protect your Twitter account. Make a strong password, don’t click links that are suspicious, or seem phishy. Twitter now has two-factor authentication that you can use. One of the most common ways that an account is hacked is when the password is shared. This can be hard to avoid if it is a business account, or multiple people tweet from and/or manage it.
Twitter has actually taken it a step further than that and introduced Teams, a feature available on their account managing software TweetDeck. Besides the owner who creates the account, and manages the password, other “contributors” can login to TweetDeck using their personal account, and tweet, follow, and do everything that the owner could do, except for change settings, like the password.
The benefit of this is that each admin (someone who can edit team members but not passwords) and contributor can still use two-factor authentication for their own login, to both their personal account and to TweetDeck. You can actually do more with TweetDeck than with the regular Twitter app, or on the website, and now you don’t even need to share your password, greatly improving the cyber safety of the account, and the business.
The owner of the account, who does have the access to change settings and the password, also has more options. They can pull access from anyone at any time, which allows for better content management, in case a contributor’s account is compromised, or unwanted content comes from a contributor or admin. It seems like a really great option for those who share the role of managing a twitter account.
What if you don’t share? How can you stay safe on Twitter? Well, all password advice you’ve ever received is probably good advice. Use a strong, unique password, change it every so often, and don’t save it on public computers. Use two-factor authentication (Twitter calls it “login verification” in the settings), and don’t enter your login information on third party websites you don’t trust. Happy Tweeting!