Written by Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Twitter Marketing Expert

The first step to protecting your Twitter reputation is to be careful what you retweet.  For example, you see a tweet with a headline that sounds so worthwhile to share with your followers that you are tempted to simply retweet without even clicking through to look at the post or article.

Okay, you may not have time to read the post or article now.  But you must click through to be sure that the article is actually about what has been tweeted and not, in fact, a sales page for some product that you do not want to appear to be promoting.

Or let’s say you read a tweet with valuable information without a link.  But you don’t recognize the person tweeting (you can’t recognize every follower once your followers get to a certain point).

Click on the person’s Twitter username to check out the person.  You want to be sure that you are not retweeting a person whose Twitter profile is – how should I say this? – less than polite.

How to Protect Your Twitter Reputation from Hackers

Now we come to the real problem with protecting your reputation on Twitter. You can do everything right in your own account and still be hacked.

Your profile info can be scraped:

This means that all the info in your profile (except the hot link) – including your real name – is used by someone else with his/her Twitter username.

In other words, the person is impersonating you and putting his/her hot link in place of yours.

This happened to me, and I learned about it when I got an email notification that I was following myself on Twitter.

Luckily the replaced hot link was to a page on Amazon and not to whatever, although I admit I was so shocked I forgot to notice what kind of book on Amazon the link went to.

What to do in this case? First I blocked the person’s username. Then I hunted around Twitter until I finally found Twitter’s impersonation policy, and I followed the steps for submitting a ticket to Twitter asking for help.
But to cover my bases, I also tweeted for help. And someone was kind enough to tweet that I should tweet @spam, which I did.  And, luckily, within minutes the impersonator account was suspended.

Then there’s hacking to take over your account and send out emails to your followers as if from you:

This happens often on Twitter.  The tip-off is usually getting a reply tweet, and the tweet says something similar to “Is this a photo of you?” with a link.

Now I don’t know what happens when you click that link, because I don’t.  What I do instead is click on the person’s Twitter username and see if he/she has recently tweeted an apology for someone having hacked his/her site.

If I don’t see any such tweets, I will send a DM if the person is following me.  If not, I will politely tweet a public reply to the person saying something such as:  Your Twitter account appears to have been hacked because I got a tweet from you that you probably didn’t send.

Often I get a reply tweet thanking me for this info and saying that the person is taking care of the problem:

• The first thing to do is change your password.
• The second thing is to tweet a public apology to people about the bogus tweet and stating you’ve taken care of the problem.
• The third thing to do is to “pay it forward” by warning anyone else whose Twitter account you notice has been hacked.

(The link tweeted from your hacked account may go, for example, to someone’s sales page or to a page set up for phishing – an attempt to get more sensitive information from you.)

To protect your Twitter password, be careful when you give third-party applications permission to use your Twitter login information.  Be sure the third-party application is a reputable one and not set up primarily to capture your password.

Twitter can be a powerful tool in your online marketing toolkit, and it is up to you to protect that tool with common sense and monitoring.