Business owners, sales representatives, corporations, and marketers alike have taken the necessary steps to properly brand their Twitter account. Twitter users will recognize these accounts because they are eloquently designed and feature properly sized profile photos, informative and keyword driven bios, working website links, and corporately branded backgrounds.
However, there is more to a Twitter account than what (initially) meets the eye.
Favourites
Twitter allows users to Favourite tweets from any other Twitter user. Indicated with a small star icon, Favouriting saves the particular tweet for later in a folder labeled "Favourites" within your Twitter account. This is similar to bookmarking a website on a computer. The Twitter Favourites folder, however, is public to anyone who would like to view your Favourite Tweets.
How would you feel if the public had access to your personal bookmarks? It is likely that you would remove a few of them.
Take a moment to review and discard any Favourite tweets that are out-of-date, off-topic, or inappropriate.
Following
There are management tools that claim to simplify users' social media lives through automated services, which can include direct messages to new followers, scheduling tweets, and immediate follow-back services. Twitter users should use automatic follow-back services with caution. Fake and spam accounts on Twitter have garnered significant attention in the media recently. Thousands of illegitimate accounts have been identified following celebrities, musicians, corporations, and politicians.
If your Twitter account has an automated follow-back application and an adult-related website follows you, you're now following them. This especially does not sit well if you are a person or company of influence or of a particular political stance.
Rather than setting yourself (and company) up for a potential media-circus, carefully review each new account that you choose to follow.
It is important that a business both develops and maintains a consistent image on Twitter. Implementing these changes will ensure that your Twitter account is squeaky clean because you never know what social media actions may and could be used against you.
image: twitter/shutterstock