Andy Beal is a pretty popular guy on Twitter; he has about 9,000 followers. So imagine his surprise when somebody pretending to be him created an account and started following people.

"A few months back - I had someone come along and register an account ... used a very similar name to me ... and tried to pretend that they were me and tried to fool people into listening to what they had to say," Beal said. "They basically followed a whole bunch of people hoping that they would follow them back and their whole goal was to piggy back off of my reputation - my brand - to try and sell their eBook."

Beal is an expert at social media strategy. He's co-author of the book "Radically Transparent, Monitoring and Managing Reputation Online."

"We live in a radically transparent world where everything you do could potentially end up on the web," he said. "With about 48 hours, they were able to identify the imposter. They were able to remove it."

But Beal's imposter was a bit crafty.

"He came back and registered new accounts. Andy_beal or andy_beal1 and started the process all over again," he said. "It was like a game of Whack-a-Mole until, ultimately, Twitter found a way to stop him from permanently coming back."

Beal said social networks have policies in place that will protect you from imposters. Facebook, for instance, has a page in its Help Center section where you can identify the imposter's URL.

"You start wondering what else do they know about you. If someone's created a profile and stolen your name and identity, the initial reaction is - what else do they know about me? Do they know my banking details? Do they know my credit card information," he said. "Typically, they don't."

Beal said even people who don't use social networking sites should check in every once in a while to make sure they, too, don't have impersonators.

"Just make sure there's not somebody impersonating you because in absence of you having an official profile it makes it even easier for someone to come along and pretend to be your mom or pretend to be my brother or something like that because there's not already an established profile there," he said.

Beal said most imposters are usually in it to create spam. But users should be careful and cautious.

"For the most part - nobody is going to take money out of your bank account. Nobody is going to do much harm that said - you don't want to let it sit there," he said. "It could be a hacker who wants you to click on a link that downloads a virus to your computer - perhaps goes through your contacts in your e-mail and then e-mails them."

He also stressed how important it is to protect your real account.

"It is important to have a very secure password. It's very important not to have something that's easy to guess," he said. "Have something that's very complex with a mixture of letters and numbers."

He also said people make mistakes when they pick a hint question.

"Normally people pick ‘where were you born?' In this day and age it's pretty easy for me to figure out where you were born. I can go into Google, find out where you went to school ... find out from there, perhaps, where you were born. All of a sudden - I know the answer to your hint question - I can perhaps get access to your profile."

 Related Story: Using Social Networking To Your Advantage