One of the dangers of Twitter, which I suppose is a danger of all technology, but is more public with Twitter, is that if your account is hacked, other people may think you are posting things that you aren’t. All of your followers will see the post, and if there’s a link, others may visit that site, not knowing that it’s not legitimate. Depending on the nature of the post, it could hurt your relationship with anyone who follows you – especially because they may not really know you.
Yesterday evening, I was looking at my Twitter feed, and I noticed a friend’s Twitter account had links to adult material. Since his website is a mainstream site, I knew it wasn’t legit, so I let my friend know about it. After looking into it a bit more, I found a second danger of Twitter – more like a danger of a Twitter set up.
My friend’s account hadn’t actually been hacked. What happened was that he set up a feed on his website’s forum that posted the title of topics and a link to the topic in his Twitter feed. Since this set-up automatically posts all topics from the forum to his Twitter account, it posted the spam from the forum. People need to be wary of this type of set up, as it can give the website a bad reputation.
Twitter allows people anf companies to have a “personal” relationship with other companies, celebrities, and people with whom they do not know. By opening a brand to Twitter, a company can put its reputation at risk if they do not closely monitor its Twitter account.
