Last week, a handful of technology journalists in Australia were inducted into the ranks of Verified Twitter personalities, myself included. Verification is a mysterious process, and we’re here to lift the lid on how the Twitter verification process works.
How Do You Get Verified?
How Twitter decides to verify people is still a fairly mysterious process, but one thing’s for sure: you can’t ask to be verified. You know, unless you’re like Rihanna or President Obama. Twitter’s verification process is there to ensure that people don’t follow fake accounts, so you’re only likely to be verified if there’s a good chance someone could impersonate you due to your stature online or in the real world. At least that’s the theory. I don’t think anyone is rushing out to create fake Luke Hopewell Twitter accounts.
How Does It Work?
Once real people over at Twitter decide you are worthy of a beautiful blue Verified tick on your profile, it invites you to go through a qualification process which teaches you a little bit about Twitter in the process.
First, you get followed by @Verified, which is Twitter’s own verification account before a direct message lands in your inbox. It looks kind of like good, old Twitter spam at first, so just to make sure you really are being verified, make sure the account the direct message came from isn’t a fake.
Just in case you’re too scared to click that Verified direct message link, though, Twitter sends an email with the link to your registered address to help you along. You can never be too careful.
Once you have clicked, there are three steps to the verification process, presented in a quiz format.
Step one sees you identify three tweets to determine your Twitter aptitude. Questions like “which of these tweets will get you more followers?”, and “which tweet will get more people clicking?”, et cetera.
Step two asks you to follow more verified users to let other people know that you’re a trustworthy source. I didn’t follow Rihanna before but if that’s what it takes to get verified I can handle the odd lunatic in my feed.
Finally, step three sees you securing your account by changing your password to something stronger. Don’t want nasty hackers getting hold of your precious, blue-tick boasting account now, do we?
And once you have hit the submit button, that’s it! You get a beautiful email saying that you’re verified and you can go and swoon over your own too-legit-to-quit Twitter profile.