Twitter as you know is a very public thing. If on the other hand you find it a little weird to have strangers following you and reading your tweets. You can create a protected account.
To protect your account.
1. Login to Twitter
2. Click on Settings
3. Scroll down and check the box besides "Protect my updates"
4. Save Changes
What happens once I protect my updates.
1. Your Tweets do not appear on the Twitter public timeline2. Your Tweets are not indexed by search engines.
3. Your Name still appears on Twitter's people search. You will receive a follow request each time someone wants to follow you. Only by allowing someone to follow you will they be able to see your Tweets.
4. When you follow someone you can see their tweets on your public Timeline but they will not be able to see your Tweets.
5. @relies sent to people following you will not be seen
6. If you already have a public twitter account but want to protect it. All updates after that will not be seen. Your profile will be still visible to approved followers.
7. People who want to follow you can send a request which you would need to approve before they can start following you. Till suck time whenever that person visits your Twitter profile. They will see the message "You've requested to follow this person. Remove?" untill you take action
If you have any further questions or feedback please use our comments section.
any idea what i should do if my account was public and a couple of people followed me, and now i want to make it private but i can't get rid of them?
ReplyDeleteYou can always block them. Find he people you want to remove click on their profile from you home page and then use the block option found by clicking the wheel icon.
ReplyDeleteWhat if I've always had a private account, but then I switch it to be public - do all of my older, private tweets become public at that time?
ReplyDeleteTwitter is very simple it's either public or private.
ReplyDeleteThe good news however is that private tweets will always remain private.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I was just curious for 2 reasons:
ReplyDelete1.) Library of Congress records all public tweets - so I didn't know if I switched from private to public, if that would mean all of my past tweets would be logged into the Library - or just the new 'public' ones.
2.) Just found out that any tweets I favorite are actually pushed to my own RSS feed. I'd love to add this RSS feed to my Google Reader, so tweets with links I could favorite, to read later on my Google Reader. Only problem with this approach is that I don't think G Reader will be able to subscribe to my favorites RSS feed because my twitter account is private. Anyone know of any way I might be able to hack this together so it works?
Thanks!