Twitter have introduced new optional security measures when logging in to your account. This measure has been primarily implemented to help larger organisations whose accounts may be more likely to be targeted by hackers.
This change will not be implemented on your account unless you select this option within the settings of your Twitter account:
You are not able to select the option until you have added a phone to your Twitter account:
Once implemented on your account, there will be a second check when you log into your account requiring you to enter a 6-digit code sent to your registered phone via SMS. This has particular implications if you share access to your Twitter account with more than one person as the code will only be sent to one registered phone.
This shouldn’t affect existing applications connected to your Twitter account, but if you need to access you account from another device you’ll need to generate a temporary password to authorise that application.
Is it worth it for most small organisations? Probably not as the extra step to login to the account will take too much time for many people and it will cause problems where businesses share Twitter account login details. The majority of compromised Twitter accounts appear to be because of ‘dubious’ apps that have been authorised to use the account rather than the account being directly ‘hacked’ and this won’t necessarily address this. However, it will provide extra peace of mind if you wish to go down this route.