What To Do When You Lose Your Twitter Password

July 23rd, 2014

twitter-117595_640Social media has become such a big, important aspect of our daily digital lives that people are inclined to panic when they get locked out of one of their cherished accounts. Twitter’s policy is to lock your account after too many failed password attempts, and if you’re a business owner, this can mean bad things for the day. Here are some useful guidelines to follow so that if it happens to you, you can minimize your downtime.

Setup Is The Key

There are two key pieces of information that are critical to password recovery. One is to remember the email account you’ve associated with Twitter, and the other is to plug your cellphone number into your Twitter profile. This is a crucial step that many people often overlook, but you should understand that if you lose access to the email account you’ve signed up to Twitter with and you never got around to entering your cellphone number, then there’s nothing that the good folk at Twitter can do. You’re simply locked out, unless you can get in touch with your email provider and regain access to that mail account.

Getting Your Password Back

Sometimes, it’s just a matter that you’ve forgotten the password to the account. The two most common causes here are if you clear your password cache from your browser, or if you’ve recently changed it and simply forgot what you changed it to. In either case, you can use this link: https://twitter.com/account/resend_password to get your password outright reset.

Once you’re back in, follow the steps listed here to re-secure your account: https://support.twitter.com/articles/31796-my-account-has-been-compromised#

If it’s the case that you’ve forgotten your Twitter user name, you can also log in via your email account and password at the main site login here: https://twitter.com/
Likewise, if you don’t remember what email account you’ve associated with your Twitter account, you can use your user name and password to log in at the same link.

Can’t Remember Your Associated Cell Phone Number?

When you’re resetting your password, if you’re prompted for your cell phone number, but can’t remember which of those you’ve associated with your account, you can enter either your user name or email address in the space provided as a substitute for that information and you will be allowed to proceed.

Lost Access To Your Associated Email Account?

Finally, if you’ve lost access to the email account you used to sign up to Twitter with, you can still access the account and that information via text message, provided that you’ve entered your cell phone number in your user profile. Again, if you have not done this, and no longer have access to the email account you used to establish your Twitter account, then you’ll be unable to regain access until and unless you can contact your email provider to gain access to that email account again.

Also bear in mind the root causes of an account lockout. If you use some overview dashboard software like HootSuite, it may be the case that if you’ve recently reset or changed your password on the main site, you’ve not yet updated your HootSuite dashboard, and it is still trying to log in using your old credentials. Either disable those accounts, or be certain that they have been updated and try again after the hour cool down period.


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