Companies Beware: Twitter Can Ruin You

Twitter is a micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text messages up to 140 characters. These texts are referred as “tweets”. It is a service to communicate and stay connected with friends, family and colleagues, through the exchange of quick and frequent messages. It has also been popularly called as the Internet SMS.

Like many other tools, twitter can also be used for both good and evil purposes. Nowadays excess use of twitter is gradually becoming a serious threat to the privacy of corporate information. The tool’s great strength of messaging many persons at a time becomes its great weakness in this context. As this tool can reveal all your business secrets and strategies in public, this can ruin your business too.

To avoid being a victim of this threat, your first step should be to protect your personal tweets if you are going to post any. This can be done via settings the protected tweets option on page.
Now it won’t show up in public searches and only your authorized followers can view them in their Twitter streams. But doing this only is not enough as protected tweets would not keep the followers away from reading and sharing your messages, having their screen shots and printing your messages etc.

Thus, to be on a safer side, be smart and don’t tweet anything that is meant only for you and absolutely not for your colleagues or public.

5 ways to screw up your business with Twitter:

If you are working on confidential projects, all night, then it’s better to stay away from social media.
If you tweet confidential information about the important policies of merger or acquisition in your company, Twitter can put your career on risk, that too without permission. If your company has taken any important decision about acquiring another company or anything that has to be declared publicly, but the press release yet to come till the next day and you tweet about it in advance, you can face serious consequences.

Always remember that the tone of your tweets is always a reflection of the image you want to present. Tweets, about your love life, break ups that contain unacceptable words and are extremely annoying in nature, can put yourself on a bad road. It can spoil your impression with your hiring manager or boss.

If you are not in a mood of working anymore or feeling tired and want to have a fresh breath, it’s always better to have a cup of tea instead of going for a twitter break. Twitter is not a healthy option at the time of work. It cannot refresh you if you are spending time tweeting at your work place it could be dangerous for your integrity and at the same time for your career too.

Talking critically on Twitter about a client or potential client should be extremely avoided. This is similar to tweeting confidential info – unflattering observations can be bad business. Don’t insult your client. It can truly be a serious harm to your business.

Twitter as a tool can be used in both good and bad ways, depending on the intentions of users. You must always be careful what you are going to post on the twitter especially before putting anything about your business or career. Sometimes your tweets can be used against yourself only. Therefore, you should always be ready with the knowledge of how you can strongly enforce the information-sharing policies. If confidential information is being shared, even innocently, you must question the judgment and authenticity of the sharer.

Balancing Twitter’s dangers and benefits may not be easy, but you should better start thinking how to deal with it today.