People often join Twitter and, like on Facebook, they are concerned for their privacy.  Let’s just get one thing straight before going further into detail, Facebook and Twitter are very different beasts.  Twitter stores a lot less personal information, and any of the information that is stored can totally be made up (Ie, creating an account for your cat with a photo of your cat and “@MrJingles08″ as a username).

However, if you do want a personal account to express your own thoughts, you may choose to protect your tweets so that only those who you’ve approved can read what you have to say.   Many people join Twitter to follow celebrities, breaking news, sports, etc, and only use it as a source of reading material; very rarely do these people tweet.  In this case, people are unlikely to follow you anyways, so you probably don’t need to worry about protecting your account.

But let’s say that you do care about expressing your own opinions and only want to share them with family and friends because you’re worried that your views may impact your public image.  All you need to do is go to your “Security and privacy” settings and click the box that says “Protect my Tweets”.  When you do this, people must send a follow request (in which you can approve or decline) in order for them to be able to read your tweets.

The default option in Twitter is to not have protected tweets – which is the option that I recommend.  Twitter gives us the ability to express ourselves to anyone across the globe, but by protecting one’s tweets, you are really cutting back on one of the greatest benefits of Twitter!  I have won multiple contests on Twitter, and I have built my business generating leads on Twitter.  I wouldn’t have been able to do either of these tasks if I had protected tweets.

Summary: If you want Twitter as a piece of reading material and only want your views to be seen by the people which you select, then protect your tweets.  Maybe you feel that your views might be seen by your employer and could hurt your image.  If you want to share your thoughts, ideas and opinions with the world, do not change your privacy settings.

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