Twitter Teams: Share your account NOT your Password

Sharing School or Organizational Twitter Accounts

Twitter has a little-known “Teams” feature that enables account owners to invite contributors without having to share a password.  Not only does this dramatically reduce the security risk associated with sharing passwords, but makes it simple for contributors to Tweet from multiple accounts without signing in and out. Schools and organizations who want to have a presence on Twitter can take advantage of the Teams feature to allow multiple users to help keep their feed populated with Tweets without the hassle of signing in and out of accounts, not to mention the huge security risk of sharing a password with multiple contributors.

Setting up a Twitter Team:

1. Sign into the account you wish to share with
   collaborators via TweetDeck, a web-based Twitter dashboard (owned by Twitter) that allows you to toggle easily between accounts and create customized views of hashtags, timelines or mentions.  If you’ve never used TweetDeck before, you’re in for a treat!!
2. Click the “Accounts” button from the left sidebar menu
3. From the expanded “Accounts” menu, you will see “Team @(account)” as an option.  Click this to access the Twitter Teams menu
4. Enter the Twitter handle of the team member you wish to add.  You can set the role of anyone to “Contributor” which means they can Tweet from the shared account, or “Admin” allowing them to also add more contributors to the account.
5. Once you have added and authorized a new user, that person will receive an email notification.  They will need to login to their Twitter account via TweetDeck and will see a notification icon in the “Accounts” tab on the left sidebar menu.  Once they accept the invitation, they will see the shared account listed under their “Accounts” tab.

Tweeting from a Shared Account:

Once you have logged in via TweetDeck to your primary account, the shared account will also be available to you, so you can easily toggle between accounts.  If you Tweet from TweetDeck, you will be able to click to select which account(s) you want the Tweet to send from (see green check marks next to accounts in the image below).  As a result, you can send the same Tweet from multiple accounts at ONE time!  It’s a huge time-saver and makes it much easier to fill the Twitter feed of a shared account.