Can someone (employee/freelancer) steal a Twitter account if you give them the password?

Question

How do you handle hiring someone to make tweets for your company but also keep the account secure?

Answer 1

You asked two questions..

Can someone (employee/freelancer) steal a Twitter account if you give them the password?

There is an option in Settings->Security and Privacy that will prevent someone from changing the password without out having 'personal information'. So that will protect you from having your password changed.

But they could change your username to something random, and then have some other twitter account take your initial username. Essential locking you out from it.

As for how you "prevent this from happening handle hiring someone to make tweets for your company but also keep the account secure?"

1. Hire people that do this as their day job
2. Lawyers.

Answer 2

Ok I found it. Apparently that is a paid feature in HootSuite. https://hootsuite.com/plans

However, I found a way around it for either HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can sign up for a throwaway Twitter account to do all the authentication yourself and add all the accounts that you need, then give out the password to the throwaway account. Since all the accounts are pre-authorized via OAuth tokens, the password is safe. The worst that can happen is someone could hack the throwaway and spew spam or such onto your linked accounts. At least the password will be safe. However, you will need an email address to create a new Twitter id, which is easy.

However, if you try to re-add the account, you will go through a lot of trouble because the services might say the account is already linked:

xxxx has already been added by another HootSuite user. Please add a different social network.

So you will have to de-activate the application and probably go through a bunch of other rigmarole.

Answer 3

I just did this. Set up a hootsuite account using a email address and password (not Twitter) and then from your account, add your twitter account. Now, you can give out your hootsuite email id and password out and they'd be able to manage your Twitter from the Hootsute web app.

I might be wrong or have not thought about it from different angles but it seems to be working. I checked it with all possible ways I could. It still lets me tweet and see the mentions and everything. Only thing is that you cannot delete the tweets you send out from Hootsuite.