Given the current volatility of Twitter in the wake of the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk and the social media channel’s uncertain future, Tunheim’s digital team offers the following guidance.
1. Security Considerations
Delete any sensitive Direct Messages in your account.
This will not, of course, delete the Direct Messages from the account with which you were communicating, but at least you will have taken the steps you could take to protect sensitive information.
If your Twitter account is tied to a personal email address that could contain sensitive data, we recommend changing the account to an organization account that does not contain sensitive information. For example, we use digital@tunheim.com as the email for our accounts but it is not used for other information/data sharing.
2. Reputational Considerations
Be on the lookout for Twitter accounts that are impersonating you. If you don’t already have searches saved for your brand and/or name, you can do so at https://twitter.com/search-advanced
Once you’ve executed your search, you can save it to your Twitter account by clicking on the three dots next to the search field and choosing Save Search from the dropdown.
It will subsequently appear in the drop-down window when you click in the search field.
If you do find an account impersonating yours, you can report it to Twitter but given the mass departures of Twitter employees in general and from the safety and security team in particular, don’t expect that to help in the immediate future…if at all.
Our best recommendation is to respond to any tweets coming from such accounts with a message flagging that the account is fake.
Also consider pinning a tweet to the top of your account listing Twitter accounts that are impersonating yours.
3. Advertising Pause
With the current uncertainty of the platform, the Tunheim digital team recommends a pause on all current Twitter advertising. To ensure that your billing information continues to be secure, we also recommend removing it from your Twitter advertising dashboard.
4. Secure Analytics Data
If you have not yet done so, download your organic tweet analytics and, if you have been running ads on Twitter, your ad campaign data.
5. Secure Archive Data
Though it appears that Twitter’s two-factor identification system is currently inoperable, it is nevertheless worthwhile to continue to try and download your Twitter archive.
6. Acquire Your Twitter Followers
This is an opportunity to acquire your Twitter followers and create a direct relationship with them. Consider taking the following immediate steps:
- Create a form (Google Forms work well) with a field for Name, Email Address, and Twitter handle
- Post a tweet saying if you want to stay connected to us in the event Twitter fails, use this form
- Pin the tweet
- Refer to the that tweet in all subsequent tweets
- If you have multiple Twitter accounts, create a separate form for each account so you know which audience is which.
Here is an example of how we have implemented this recommendation: https://twitter.com/tunheimagency/status/1593671635973849093
7. Review Social Listening Options
If you subscribe to a social listening service, initiate a review of your options.
All of these tools rely heavily on Twitter as the only largely publicly-available data set of social conversations. There are two concerns about the viability of these services.
One, if Twitter ceases to exist it could cripple these tools, potentially irreparably. There is no other similar data set to which these tools could turn to replace that data.
Two, even before the mass exodus of Twitter staff, users were beginning to abandon Twitter as the culture changed with Musk’s takeover of the platform. If that continues or gets more volatile, the data generated from those users who remain will likely be far less representative of the overall public than it was before Musk got the keys to the kingdom.