3 Quick And Easy Ways To Make Your Twitter Account Safer

There is a crazy world of hackers out there that affect thousands (or even millions) of people on Twitter. The people who hacked Donald Trump and Burger King’s accounts taught us how important security is. However, many people have the, “That won’t happen to me” attitude towards a problem that has spread across numerous accounts. From “Lol I saw this bad picture of you” to “I can’t believe this is you,” spam has made a notorious splash into the social network.

You do not want to wait for your account to get hacked until you take action. Sadly, I did not take action until my account got hacked. It was a messy two days where I lost hundreds of visitors who were redirected to porn sites when they clicked on links to my blog posts. Those two days were very bad indeed (luckily, I had a good track race, so that made me feel better about myself).

Do not make the mistake of ignoring this blog post. The tips here will help make your Twitter account safer. You do not want to be reading this blog post when your Twitter account gets hacked. You will want to read this blog post right now and implement the tactics here so your account never gets hacked in the first place. Thee are the 3 quick and easy ways to make your Twitter account safer.

1. You need a (much) stronger password. Your password needs to be more than 8 characters long. In my opinion, everyone’s password should be at least 20 characters and have symbols to make things more confusing for the hacker. The longer your password is, the less likely a hacker is to figure it out.
2. Change your password every month. Although this will be hard for some people to remember, changing your password every month is well worth it. Heartbleed and the NSA have revealed to us how not so secret our information is. Maybe when the NSA keeps our data safe and secure, we would not have to change our passwords every month. However, hackers will still find ways to discover your password which is why you should change it every month. In a fascinating blog post from CopyBlogger, they mentioned that their blog gets 50,000-180,000 unauthorized logins every day. That results in over 1 million unauthorized logins every week. By changing your password every month, you will reduce the likelihood of getting hacked.
3. Remove third-party apps that you do not trust. Sometimes, we rush to give access to bad third-party apps by mistake. This was most likely the reason why my account got hacked and sent people to inappropriate content. The problem was quickly resolved when I purged through my list of third-party apps. In order to access your list of third-party apps, go to settings (the gear) and then on the left corner will be “apps.” Clicking on that will allow you to see a list of all of your third-party apps which you could revoke with a click.

Do not wait to implement these tactics until your account gets hacked. Because I waited, I had a race against time in order to find a solution. By waiting for my account to get hacked, I lost 300 visitors. If 1% of those people would have bought one of my books, then that means I lost three sales, but just as important, people who would stick around, read my content, and subscribe to my blog. Learn from my mistake so you will not get hacked, and if you do get hacked, you will know exactly what to do.