You really have to be very careful these days when you put yourself out there in front of the public, especially when you begin to build a name for yourself. There are a lot of nut cases out there who can’t wait to take pot shots at you…some of them not so nice. This article is going to deal with Twitter specifically since it is so popular today. These are just a few common sense tips that should help keep you out of trouble. Nothing is fool proof, but these will help.

At the top of the list, and this goes for any place online and not just Twitter, never give personal info about yourself such as where you live. You never know who’s going to send you a ton of junk mail to your postal address just as a joke. It won’t be a joke when you have to go through all that stuff. For some people, it’s probably not a good idea to even use your real name. I found that out the hard way. Of course I like to brand myself so I have to expect to take the bad with the good. Ultimately, it’s your choice as to how much of yourself you put out there.

Next, you want to make sure that you keep all your info, such as passwords, secure. In fact, you might want to regularly change your password. In choosing one, what I do is let Roboform do it for me. Roboform is a great little utility that remembers all your passwords for you plus, if you allow it to choose yours for you, it comes up with some pretty hard to crack ones. They’re all a minimum of 8 characters and pretty well mixed up. They’re certainly better than the ones most people come up with themselves.

But what if somebody steals your identity or makes trouble for you over at Twitter? No problem. Simply report them to Twitter and let them handle it. They have a form that you can fill out where you can choose the offense. One of them is impersonation, which is a great way to damage somebody’s reputation. In order to prove this, you do have to provide Twitter with your personal information so that they can contact you. In this case, you won’t mind it.

Sad as it is, it’s a dangerous world out there. I have learned this first hand. You can never be too careful and no, nothing is 100% fool proof. But if you take enough precautions and report any violations, you give yourself the best chance of surviving the social networking jungle that Twitter is a part of.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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