Official Business Accounts Needed On Twitter
Many people have joined Twitter and see the value of the real time communication network as a way to get opinions on issues, share information with the community as well as promote products and services. Government agencies are starting to leverage twitter to provide real time local updates of community events, news and even as an alert service.
Some police departments are now using Twitter accounts to notify people of local incidents, traffic accidents, missing persons reports and more. But in doing this Twitter also exposes a most dangerous side in that anyone can create an account and impersonate just about anything.
A Twitter account by the name of Austin PD with the official seal of the Austin City was posting messages on Twitter impersonating the city police department. Though the messages were harmless and the account was disabled you can imagine the real possible issues that can result from such a thing.
Should someone spout fake or missing persons messages, they might be taken seriously leading to money being spent in investigations and shutting down the account. Carefully phrased or worded accounts could appear to be official and might mislead people to think they are receiving official information from a government agency.
One such solution to this problem is for Twitter to quickly and easily establish two separate types of accounts, a Business account and a personal account. A business account must go through a verification process and have some official way to validate it as a corporation, or city agency. Whereas a personal account can be exactly as the accounts are now.
This way when companies or government agencies create Twitter accounts they can have an official business account that was validated and confirmed and has more credibility and reliability than a standard personal account. Twitter can even charge a nominal fee for such an account to help ensure its legitimacy and perhaps help fund its infrastructure.
By maybe some purchased promotion, business accounts can get more followers or by default have a listing in some sort of business index on twitter as an added incentive package. This type of direction for Twitter can bring in financing which the company needs to leverage to keep growing its infrastructure as well as provide companies with more incentive for joining and promoting on Twitter.
All I know is when I follow a company, radio station, or local agency I can’t know for certain if it is legitimate just because of the account name and logo. I don’t want to follow something that I think is a real agency or company only to later be mislead and this is something that Twitter should be looking at resolving.
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This is an excellent article and more people should read it. It could possibly save some lives by making people aware of this situation. Bravo for your insight!
Margie Graulaus last blog post..How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
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