Four stupidly simple things to do to protect your brand’s Twitter feed
It was only last week we were all congratulating Nokia for their user of Twitter. But yesterday the account posted a ‘fuck you’ to its followers. Literally.
And now we can’t quite look them in the eye.
We don’t know whether it was a joke gone wrong, a disgruntled community manager or someone hacking into the account. But it’s a bit awkward, because it was quite likely that it was posted by someone who had access to the account.
“How does something like that happen?” you might ask. Easy. You gave the password to the wrong person.
These four easy rules help prevent such schoolboy slip-ups happening to your brand:
Don’t use stupid passwords
I’ve seen some stupid passwords in my time, ranging from brandname1 to the agency’s post code. Come on. You can do better than that. And certainly don’t use the same password for multiple different brands. I’ve known agencies use one password for all their accounts. Literally every single one. And I bet they haven’t changed it, which leads me to the next point…
Change passwords regularly
I know it’s easier to have the same password for a long time. No doubt saved in a excel file with ALL the other login details for the brand. But it’s not secure. And now that person that left your company 6 months ago can still access the account.
Only give out to those who need it
Does every single person working on the account need the password? No. So don’t give it to them.
Consider using third-party apps that have multi-user access permissions
If you are going to allow lots of people to login to the account you might want to require them to use a third party app to do so. Platforms such as buddy media and hootsuite allow a single admin account to have the login details which can then be granted to other users (and revoked if necessary).
There you go. Four ridiculously simple things to do to keep your Twitter account safe. So simple it’s almost insulting. But I bet most brands are breaking at least one or two of these rules.
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