A large part of Twitter's beauty is its simplicity. Sign up to many of the other social networking sites and you'll be asked questions about your life that cover everything from where you went to school to your favorite color.
On Twitter, people are happy to let everyone know what they had for lunch (as well as breakfast, supper, brunch, afternoon snack, and what they dunked in their coffee) but that's not because Twitter asks them to.
In fact, the site keeps everything very clean and easy to use.
In this chapter, I'm going to help you get to grips with the basics of Twitter. It's not difficult to understand, but you will need to know the way the site works and how to use it. I'll explain what happens during registration, what followers and tweets are, and how to send and receive those all-important messages.
Signing Up—Does Twitter Have the Web's Most Friendly Registration Page?
At some point, every Internet entrepreneur is going to face a dilemma. They look at Google's home page with its white space and single line search box and they realize that simple is good.
Then they look at the list of all the features they want their site to include and they stuff their home page and their registration page—and every other page—with features and information that only a fraction of their users will want and only a few people will ever use.
It's just too tempting, and it's a mistake that gums up the works of businesses as varied as dating services and networking sites.
Twitter didn't make that mistake. Hit the big green button on their home page—you can't miss it—and you'll be taken to a sign-up page thtat has just three fields: username, password, and e-mail address.
You'll also be asked to enter a couple of words to prove that you're human.
It couldn't be simpler, could it?
Well actually, this is where simple can be bad.
It's the first place you can make a mistake.
Your username isn't just a phrase you're going to enter when you sign in. It will form part of your URL and will be visible whenever you promote your Twitter page.
It's like a choosing a domain name for a Web site. Choose poorly, and you could affect your Twitter account's ability to gather followers and build a reputation.
Your username might be the first thing you enter, but it should be an item you think about deeply.
Your full name is a possibility, provided it hasn't been taken already, but another good option is to use your Web site's domain name. That would link your site together with your Twitter account and make clear that the one is just a natural extension of the other.
Whatever you choose, just make sure that it's:
Once you've picked a username, entered a password, and proven that you're a human being and not a robot bent on sending everyone spam, you'll begin a three-step process that will start you following people on Twitter.
None of these steps takes more than a minute or two, but the good news is that you can skip them if you want to.
The even better news is that you should skip these steps, at least for now.
The first step is to search any online mail service that you use—such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail—to see whether anyone with the e-mail addresses listed in your address book has already registered an account at Twitter.
The second step is to start following anyone in your address book who is already on the site.
And the third step presents you with a giant list containing everyone in your address book who isn't on Twitter, so that you can send them an invitation to join the site.
It means that you can start following your friends and contacts right away. And it means too that you can bring in everyone you know so that they're following you.
So why do I think you should skip this stage when you sign up?
Because the most powerful way to win followers on Twitter is to follow them yourself.
If you start following people on Twitter, they'll receive a message saying that you're following them.
They'll then come to your Twitter page, and at this stage of your registration what will they see?
Nothing.
You haven't uploaded a picture yet. You haven't designed your Twitter page yet.
You haven't even issued a tweet yet!
Why would anyone choose to follow a Twitterer with a profile like that?
Being able to see which of your friends and contacts are already on Twitter—and follow them all right away—is such a valuable tool that you shouldn't waste it until your own profile is ready.
Until then, it's going to be more valuable for Twitter, which will pick up referrals to everyone on your contact list, than to you.
You will be able to come back to this later when your profile is ready, so my advice would be to skip this step for now, and. …
Create an Inviting Twitter Profile
Skip the instant searching and you'll be taken right into your profile.
At this stage, there won't be much to see. You'll have the default blue background. Your profile image will consist of the default brown square with the odd “o_O” logo inside. And you'll have no followers, you'll be following no one, and you'll have no updates.
You shouldn't do any of those things next. You certainly shouldn't start by telling “us what you're doing in the box above.”
Who's “us”?
Or at least no one will read it until they've started following you. At that time, they'll be free to see the first tweet you uploaded—which, because you just did it to see what this tweeting thing is all about, might not be very interesting at all.
It's a bit like uploading a random Web page just to see what creating a Web page is like—and then leaving it up for all future users to see.
Forget about sending tweets for now.
Don't worry about finding some friends to follow.
And you certainly don't need to concern yourself about turning on your mobile to update your friends while you're on the go.
Instead, click the Settings link at the top of the page and give yourself a proper profile.
You'll be presented with a form that looks a lot like the sort of forms you're used to filling in on social media sites. You'll have a list of questions to answer that look simple, but actually require a little thought.
Name and Username
It starts with your name.
Yes, you should know your name, and that question shouldn't be hard. But it might be.
You probably have more than one name. You have a name. Your Web site might have a name. Your business might have a completely different name.
And that's assuming you just have one business and one Web site.
I've already pointed out the importance of choosing a username that can be typed directly into the browser. That's vital, and even though it's going to appear at the top of your profile page, it's never going to be pretty.
Because it's also a URL, whatever phrase you choose is going to appear as one word.
Your “name” will appear on the right of your Twitter page and reveals who you really are.
So before you type in your name, you have to decide which brand you want your Twitter page to represent.
Will the tweets be about what you're doing now or will they be about what your company or Web site is doing now?
Do you see the difference?
My followers tend to be people who want tips and advice about Internet marketing. When they look for that advice, they don't turn to my company, Infomedia. They look for me.
My Twitter profile, therefore, uses both my username and my real name, so that I'm easy to find and so that anyone reading my tweets understands that they're coming directly from me.
They're getting information that they can trust.
Note that on the right of this page, Twitter points out that you can change your username without affecting the tweets and messages you've already sent and received.
That doesn't mean you should just enter the first username you think of.
Although your current store of messages will be safe, you will have to tell your followers about the change. When you've got a lot of followers—and if you use the strategies in the next chapter, you will have a lot of followers—that's always going to be a real pain.
In fact, one good strategy when you join Twitter is to open multiple accounts so that you can tweet about different subjects on different timelines. Twitter doesn't allow cybersquatting—and Twitterers who have tried it have had their accounts suspended—but if you think you might need more than one account, then it's worth reserving your usernames sooner rather than later.
Twitter is becoming a popular place!
E-Mail
Your choice of name and username isn't going to be too difficult. If you have more than one identity or brand, it might take a little thought but usually, the choice should be fairly clear.
Your choice of e-mail is a lot easier.
This isn't an e-mail address that anyone is going to see. If people want to contact you through Twitter, they'll have to do it either by replying to one of your tweets or by sending you a direct message. But they won't see your e-mail address.
The address you enter here will only be used to receive information such as Twitter's newsletters and to change your password.
If you're the kind of person who tends to forget passwords, that second use can be pretty helpful! Make sure that you choose an e-mail address that you actually use.
Time Zone
Time on the Internet tends to be a pretty strange thing. Check your e-mail client and you might find all sorts of strange times attached to the e-mails you've received; often they look like they have no relationship at all to the time the message was sent.
Usually, that doesn't matter at all.
On Twitter though, because tweets describe what you're doing now, time is important.
So for the most recent posts, Twitter displays how long ago the tweets were sent. If a tweet is a day old though, the time stamp refers to the time the tweet was sent based on the time zone the follower entered on the settings page.
I think that's a bit confusing. I'd rather know what time of day the person I'm following sent his tweets.
Again, it's not a hard question, but I think this is one that Twitter got wrong.
More Info URL
And now we come to something that's really crucial.
Twitter's profile appears to provide space to promote just one Web site. In fact, as I'll point out later in this section, with a little creativity, it's possible to promote all the Web sites you want.
But even then, one Web site—the link that appears beneath your name on the right of the screen—will always be the most prominent. It's the one that people will click to find out exactly who you are and what lies behind this Twitterer.
That makes the link very, very powerful.
Usually, you'll want to link to your main Web site. Sometimes though, you might want to change this link to suit a particular promotion. If you were promoting a new e-book or affiliate product, for example, you could tweet about it on Twitter and link from your profile to a landing page. Your tweets then would become another channel to bring potential buyers to your store.
Do you see how useful this can be?
One-Line Bio
So far, all of the fields I've discussed have been very, very simple.
They're very important—and you should know that they're much more important than they look—but none of them should have you scratching your head for more than a few seconds.
Your bio will take some effort, and a fair bit of thought, too.
Writing about yourself is never much fun. That's especially true when you're doing it for business. You have to find the things in your life that are interesting to others, make yourself appear professional, and do it all without boasting or sounding vain.
Usually, that's pretty hard.
Twitter makes it a real challenge—it only gives you 160 characters.
That's right, you get just 20 more characters than you have to write a tweet to describe your entire life history.
What a relief!
That means you can't go into detail, talk about all the things you've done and what you do for others. All you can do is choose one or two of the most important facts about you and write a sentence.
As an example, for a long time, my bio used to say:
“Husband, Father. Author. Speaker, Social Media Expert, Teacher. Generally Nice Guy.”
You could follow exactly the same model, or you could produce your own. If you published a sports Web site, for example, you could write something like:
“Football fan, youth coach, and all-round sports nut with bad knees.”
If you wanted to create a bio like this, you don't have to do any more than fill in these blanks:
“[Professional description 1], [Professional description 2] and [Professional description 3] who likes to [Personal description.]”
A professional photographer looking to use Twitter to promote his services then, could easily use that format to create a bio that said:
“Wedding photographer, portrait pro, and creative artist who likes to photograph his kids at embarrassing moments.”
A landscape contractor could come up with a bio that looks like this:
“Tree surgeon, garden expert and green-fingered designer who likes to smell freshly-cut grass.”
And someone who blogs about sport could use that format to create this bio:
“Lakers fan, Yankees nut, and fantasy football coach who likes to tailgate downwind of the barbecues.”
Do you see how bios like these leave room for just two or three basic facts about you while still allowing space for a little personal touch? That's all you have room for on Twitter, and it's all you need.
If people want to find out more they'll have to come to your Web site. (I told you that link was going to be important!)
So one way of writing your Twitter bio is to summarize yourself in 160 characters. That's the approach I've chosen and it's a very simple one.
An alternative approach is to write a bio that discusses a particular project.
This is a very different use of Twitter. Instead of tweeting about yourself in general, you'll be tweeting on one theme—which you can then change when that project ends.
He probably does that mostly because he enjoys it—tweeting is fun, after all—but there's no question that his tweets also help to generate interest in his latest projects so that when they're released, they already have an audience.
In the fall of 2008, for example, the BBC sent Stephen Fry around the world to film a documentary series about endangered animals. Fry constantly changed his location to reflect where he was tweeting from and updated his bio to describe what he was doing at the time.
This is something that any marketer could do.
A photographer sent to Alaska for a week to shoot oil wells could change the location on his bio to reflect where he is now, and alter his bio to:
“Currently shooting oil wells in Alaska for Shell.”
A landscape contractor could edit his bio to describe a big project he's been hired to complete:
And someone who was writing an e-book about fantasy football could write this in his bio:
“Now working on the ultimate guide to real success with fantasy football.”
Since putting this book together, for example, I've changed my bio to emphasize my work with Twitter.
Bios like these look like tweets themselves—but they're not.
When you have a lot of followers, it can be a very powerful way of promoting your work.
Location
After asking you to sum up your life in 160 characters, Twitter then asks “Where in the world are you?”
We've already seen how changing your location to reflect where you happen to be working on a particular project can be very helpful.
Usually though, you'll be working in the same place most of the time, so you should be a little careful here.
I don't try to hide the fact that I live in Loveland, Colorado. In fact, I talk about it quite a lot on my blog. It's a beautiful place and I feel very blessed that I'm able to live here.
I don't think that placing my location on my bio would really affect my branding, but I don't want people to feel that my work is somehow connected to Colorado. It isn't, so I chose to leave it off.
If there's a chance that your location could localize your work, then you might want to leave the location off, too.
Protect My Updates
I'll skip the language setting because that's pretty self-explanatory. The last option on this page, though, is perhaps the most important of all.
Twitter's last question is whether you want to keep your tweets confidential so that only the people you approve see them, or whether you're prepared to let anyone at all see them.
If you're using Twitter for marketing, do not click this box.
You want to let anyone who wants to see your tweets. You want as many people as possible to come to your Twitter page, realize that you have fantastic, interesting tweets that they want to read, and sign up to be your followers.
If people can't see your updates, they're not going to sign up. You'll be restricted to tweeting to the friends, family, and contacts that you've chosen.
That's like a store owner hanging a “closed” sign on the door and only dealing with her friends.
If you want to tweet only about personal stuff, that's fine. But it's a different use of Twitter. If you want to use Twitter to build your brand and grow your business, then leave that box unchecked.
There are six Settings tabs all together, but for now I want to skip past the Password, Devices, and Notices settings, and continue with the tabs that relate to your profile—the way you'll appear to followers.
There's no getting around this step.
If you don't add a photo to your profile, you'll appear on the page as two strange circles. That's not very attractive, and worst of all, it makes you look like you're not serious about your time on Twitter.
When people add their photos, they'll expect to see yours in return.
And it has to be a good picture too, one that portrays you as both professional and personable—exactly what your tweets should be doing.
Remember, though, that the picture itself is going to appear very small, so it's a good idea to use a close-up of your face that makes you recognizable, even when you're no bigger than a thumbnail. Try to include a full-body shot and your expression will probably appear no larger than a couple of millimeters on someone's screen.
You'll usually be better off with a good portrait that shows you smiling and at ease.
That's easier said than done, and in practice people make a lot of mistakes here.
Spend any time at all on social networking sites and you'll see photograph after photograph that look blurry or are just plain inappropriate. Here are number of guidelines to follow when adding your picture to any social media site, including Twitter:
Don't hold the camera yourself.
Showing your arm doesn't look cool. In fact, it looks like you couldn't find a friend to hold the camera for you, or you don't know how to work the camera's self-timer. Neither of those create good impressions—and neither creates good pictures either.
The pictures that I use on my social media sites have all been professionally shot. If you're serious about marketing with social media that's something you might want at least to consider too. You can either visit a local photography studio or use BetterBusinessShots.com, a service that will send you to a local hand-picked photographer who will shoot a selection of portraits specifically for online use at prices that start at $99.
Alternatively, you can just ask someone to lend you a hand so that you don't have to show your arm.
Use a good camera.
Many laptops today come with built-in webcams. Desktop Web cameras are almost as standard as a keyboard and mouse, and even the cheapest mobile phone comes complete with a lens, e-mail facility, and practically a portable photography studio, too.
Don't use them.
Cameras like these tend to produce low-quality images with lots of distortion. They're hard to focus and often produce images that are grainy rather than clear.
If you want to video conference with a friend or a business partner on the other side of the country, your webcam will do a fine job. I use mine all the time.
If you want to snap your friends at a birthday dinner, your mobile phone is just the ticket.
But when you're creating a portrait that will represent you on a social media site, use a real camera. Nothing else is good enough.
Keep the backgrounds to a minimum.
Because you have such a tiny amount of space to squeeze your picture into, anything in the background is going to interfere with the most important item in the frame: you.
Ideally, your features should fill most of the frame. And behind you, there should be just about nothing.
You might be able to get away with a horizon line, the sea, or the sky but if the background is busy in any way—if it shows trees, parts of buildings, or your car—it's going to distract from your portrait and look unfocused.
Find a nice white wall or a good high balcony and stand your friend, with the camera, directly in front of you.
Show yourself.
And finally, use your picture, not a photograph of your cat, your dog, your hamster, your favorite comic book hero, or some squiggle that you feel might do a good job of representing you.
If you're tweeting on behalf of your company, then you can get away with using your company logo. Other than that though, you'll need to use your photograph.
Social media is all about personal branding. It's about the connections you build as an individual and how you work that network.
To create those connections, you can't be a wallflower. You need to show your face. So shy or not, you need to upload a picture to your profile.
And it has to be a good one!
Your profile design, though, is a lot more complicated.
I've pointed out that Twitter leaves you very little room for creativity in your bio. You're not going to be able to say too much when you only have 160 characters.
And the site is very tightfisted with the links too. Most of us have more than one site we'd like to promote, and it would also be good to bring Twitter's users into our Facebook network, Flickr streams, and MySpace pages. Being forced to place just one link on your profile is like taking a kid to a candy store and telling him he can only choose one piece of candy.
Why restrict your followers to just one marketing channel?
But you'll have to do a bit of planning.
Twitter gives you a selection of twelve background images to choose from.
You don't want to choose any of them. You want to create your own background and upload it by clicking the Change background image link beneath Twitter's designs.
Instead of leaving the left side of your Twitter page blank or filled with some strange design, you want to use that space to promote your business.
That strip is valuable real estate, and not using it as good as leaving money on the table.
This what my Twitter profile looks like. Take a look at the left side of the screen. You can think of it as having four separate sections.
The first section is the top-left hand corner. This is where the page begins so it needs to function as an introduction. It should say who you are and indicate with a glance what you do.
That means this corner should contain an image or text that's visually enticing and which draws the viewer down the column.
Directly beneath that, I've created an information column.
This is just a vertical bar that runs alongside my tweets and tells my followers basic information about me and—even more importantly—where they can go to find out more.
At the top of the sidebar, I've placed a second picture of myself.
You don't have to place a picture there if you don't want to. It depends on the nature of your business and what you're promoting with Twitter.
If you're promoting your personal brand, then using an image that's larger than the tiny box provided for your profile can be very helpful.
People will see your profile thumbnail on someone else's Twitter page then click it to see who you are. They'll reach your profile and by seeing a second photo will feel that they're getting more than the simple introduction the thumbnail provides. They'll feel that they're getting a peek behind the scenes of your business.
If you're promoting a product or a brand though, you could place a picture of that product here, or simply go straight into the text on the information bar.
That begins with a brief introduction. One option is to explain what followers will receive if they continue reading your tweets.
An introduction like this provides information about the benefits of becoming a follower, says something about what you do, and also functions as a “call to action,” encouraging people to hit that Follow button.
“Follow me as I travel the world, visit ancient sites and eat some very strange food.”
It's very simple and it can be very effective.
An alternative approach is to do something even simpler. You can thank the user for following you and send him off to learn more about you. That's the approach I now take in my sidebar.
What could possibly be easier than that?
The bulk of the information bar is just a list of links that tell followers where they can go to discover more. Again, this is very simple, but it could well be the most important part of your Twitter presence.
You can have all the followers you want. You could have tens of thousands of people reading your tweets every day and telling all their friends about you. But if that's all they do, they're going to be of no use to you.
You need them to come to your other Web sites. You need them to click your ads, purchase your products, or subscribe to your services.
You need them to help you make money—and that's not going to happen directly on Twitter. It can only happen by sending them to your other sites.
This sidebar is the place to tell them where they can find those sites.
Note how I provide lots of different options, and how I use headings to make the differences between those options clear.
This is a very different strategy from one that you might be using on your Web site. There, you're more likely to use just a few external links so that you can control where your users go and so that those links don't compete with your ads.
Here's the secret…
Your sidebar is actually an ad. It functions just like a Google AdSense unit—but it's your Google AdSense unit.
AdSense is probably the most used advertising network on the Internet. Operated by Google, the system's ads, delivered automatically and contextualized to match the page content, are what turned the search engine company into a multibillion-dollar corporation.
You can't put AdSense units on your Twitter page. But you can create your very own AdSense-type unit that promotes you.
The design is different, but the principle is exactly the same. You're tweets are your content—good content, of course—and the ad runs alongside it. Naturally, it looks nothing like an ad so that people actually want to look at it, not run away from it.
That's the foundation of smart AdSense implementation, and it works in exactly the same way with these homemade “ads” on Twitter.
And just as an AdSense unit usually includes lots of different links, so that readers have a choice and are likely to find at least one of them interesting, so your sidebar is more likely to tempt your readers if it's filled with lots of different URLs.
So the headings tell people what sort of content they can find on those sites, and directly beneath those headings are the URLs themselves.
There is however one very important difference between your Twitter sidebar and an AdSense unit:
You can't click the links in your sidebar.
It's just an image. It doesn't do anything except provide a background to your tweet timeline.
Clearly, that's a huge weakness. You can do something to get around it with some smart design work. I've made the headings and keywords in my information bar blue so that they look like links.
They might not function as links, but they will be as eye-catching as links.
Note that I didn't make the URLs themselves blue. That would be misleading. Followers might want to click them, and they'd be irritated when they find that they can't.
The best I can do to help guide them to my Web sites is to make the heading stand out in standard link blue, and create enough curiosity with my tweets to make followers type the URL into the browser to learn more.
And finally, at the bottom of the page, I've highlighted one particular link that I would really like my Twitter users to follow. In this case, it's my Twitter survey—much of the information from which went into this book.
But the beauty of that last section of the information bar is that it can change.
Whenever you want to promote a new product, all you have to do is edit your background image and change the information about the product page.
If you're thinking that I should have put that promotion at the top of my information bar, then think again.
Your most important product should go at the top of the information bar—the brand that you want most to promote. In the case of my Twitter page, that's my personal brand.
My Twitter page isn't about my Twitter survey. It's about me, so my brand goes at the top of the page. The Twitter survey is the second most important item I'd like to promote, so that goes at the bottom of the page, together with an image, so that it stands out.
Designing a Commercial Background Image for Twitter
Or rather the design is simple, because creating your background image can be a little technical.
It's not very technical but if, like me, you know absolutely nothing about graphic design you might want to outsource the image production itself to a professional designer.
Supply the mock-up, explain what you want the image to include, and let the designer do the hard work of making sure all the figures add up—because your design will need to have all the right dimensions if it's going to succeed.
Hugh Briss, for example, offers customized Twitter backgrounds through his Web site, TwitterImage.com. Prices start from $75, and he's already created beautiful backgrounds for some of Twitter's biggest users, including Chris Pirillo (twitter.com/chrispirillo) and blogging expert Darren Rowse (twitter.com/problogger).
That's the easiest option. But actually, there are a whole bunch of different ways of creating a background image for Twitter, and some of them are very easy indeed.
If I can do it, no one has an excuse!
1 Do it all yourself. The hard way is to open up Photoshop (or Gimp or Paint.Net, if you prefer to use a simpler graphics program that doesn't cost anything) and get designing.
Here's what you need to know:
The maximum size for the image is 800kb.
The image dimensions can be flexible. Mine is , which is standard and does the job. Stretching it to
18981593×20481707×, though, would make sure it fills even the biggest screens.
The dimensions of the sidebar on the left are
80pixels587× pixels.
The top of the Twitter logo is 14 pixels from the top of the page. Place the highest point of your first image on the same line and it will be level with the logo.
Note that while you can put a sidebar—or anything else—on the right side of the page too, there's no guarantee that it will appear on screens with different sizes; on small screens, it could be hidden by the Twitter timeline. If you're putting the sidebar on the left, adding information on the right might also be distracting: you just want your users to see your links and your tweets, then surf on to find more. Hugh Briss, though, has come up with some pretty neat designs that use both sides of the screen.
If you've got skills with colors, shapes, and design programs, then you can use these figures to get creative. If you don't, you can keep things simple.
2 Use a free template. Twitterer Wayne Sutton (twitter.com/waynesutton) has uploaded a free template that anyone can download and use as a foundation for their own backgrounds.
You can download the template file from Box.net at www.box.net/shared/lgw2pz4gso. Having saved the file, you'll be able to open it and start making the changes you want to the picture and the text.
That will give you the sidebar, but it won't give you a unique background design for the rest of the page. Fortunately there are a number of ways to deal with that, too.
3 Use a free background design. Designer Natalie Jost (twitter.com/natalie) is giving away a bunch of beautiful background patterns at TwitterPatterns.com. You can only use them on your Twitter page—so no using them on your Web site without paying Natalie for her work first—but there are some beautiful choices there.
Alternatively, GrungeTextures.com also offers a big selection of textures and backgrounds that you can use under a Creative Commons license.
4 Use my background as a template. Want to see what someone's background image looks like without all of the Twitter stuff on it?
Right click anywhere on the Twitter page and you'll be given a list of menu items. One of those menu items is “View background image.”
On Twitter, people are happy to let everyone know what they had for lunch (as well as breakfast, supper, brunch, afternoon snack, and what they dunked in their coffee) but that's not because Twitter asks them to.
In fact, the site keeps everything very clean and easy to use.
In this chapter, I'm going to help you get to grips with the basics of Twitter. It's not difficult to understand, but you will need to know the way the site works and how to use it. I'll explain what happens during registration, what followers and tweets are, and how to send and receive those all-important messages.
Signing Up—Does Twitter Have the Web's Most Friendly Registration Page?
At some point, every Internet entrepreneur is going to face a dilemma. They look at Google's home page with its white space and single line search box and they realize that simple is good.
Membership of Twitter is free … but restricted to humans
Then they look at the list of all the features they want their site to include and they stuff their home page and their registration page—and every other page—with features and information that only a fraction of their users will want and only a few people will ever use.
It's just too tempting, and it's a mistake that gums up the works of businesses as varied as dating services and networking sites.
Twitter didn't make that mistake. Hit the big green button on their home page—you can't miss it—and you'll be taken to a sign-up page thtat has just three fields: username, password, and e-mail address.
You'll also be asked to enter a couple of words to prove that you're human.
It couldn't be simpler, could it?
Well actually, this is where simple can be bad.
It's the first place you can make a mistake.
Your username isn't just a phrase you're going to enter when you sign in. It will form part of your URL and will be visible whenever you promote your Twitter page.
It's like a choosing a domain name for a Web site. Choose poorly, and you could affect your Twitter account's ability to gather followers and build a reputation.
Your username might be the first thing you enter, but it should be an item you think about deeply.
Your full name is a possibility, provided it hasn't been taken already, but another good option is to use your Web site's domain name. That would link your site together with your Twitter account and make clear that the one is just a natural extension of the other.
Whatever you choose, just make sure that it's:
- Closely associated with you. The formula “twitter.com/username” makes finding people on Twitter very easy. If you don't want to search around for someone, you can just pop their name after “twitter.com” and see if they're there. It's very easy and it means you can have hours of (almost) endless fun. Try surfing to twitter.com/billgates, for example, or twitter.com/stevejobs. Or toss in any other celebrity you can think of and try to figure out which are real Twitterers. But people are only going to be able to use this easy URL facility to find you if your username is a phrase that's closely associated with you. That's made even more important by Twitter's onsite search engine, which is very precise. While Facebook's search engine will return suggestions and near-misses if it can't find an exact match, Twitter will just tell you that it can't find that person. If you pick a random username, you leave a valuable advantage on the table.
- Easy to remember. If a username is closely associated with you, it should be easy to remember, but that isn't always the case. Opt for something long to make it stand out, and you'll increase the chances that even a small typo will send potential followers the wrong way. Tossing in numbers as a way of keeping a version of common name to yourself works fine in passwords, but as a username that's going to form part of your URL, it's a strict no-no. Keep it short, simple to remember, and closely associated with who you are and what you do. You can change your Twitter URL, but if you're going to do that, you should do it good and early. Creating a new name after you've already created a long list of followers is something you should really try to avoid.
Once you've picked a username, entered a password, and proven that you're a human being and not a robot bent on sending everyone spam, you'll begin a three-step process that will start you following people on Twitter.
None of these steps takes more than a minute or two, but the good news is that you can skip them if you want to.
The even better news is that you should skip these steps, at least for now.
The first step is to search any online mail service that you use—such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail—to see whether anyone with the e-mail addresses listed in your address book has already registered an account at Twitter.
You can start searching on Twitter even before you've created your profile. But you should probably create your profile first.
And the third step presents you with a giant list containing everyone in your address book who isn't on Twitter, so that you can send them an invitation to join the site.
It means that you can start following your friends and contacts right away. And it means too that you can bring in everyone you know so that they're following you.
So why do I think you should skip this stage when you sign up?
Because the most powerful way to win followers on Twitter is to follow them yourself.
If you start following people on Twitter, they'll receive a message saying that you're following them.
They'll then come to your Twitter page, and at this stage of your registration what will they see?
Nothing.
You haven't uploaded a picture yet. You haven't designed your Twitter page yet.
You haven't even issued a tweet yet!
Why would anyone choose to follow a Twitterer with a profile like that?
Being able to see which of your friends and contacts are already on Twitter—and follow them all right away—is such a valuable tool that you shouldn't waste it until your own profile is ready.
Until then, it's going to be more valuable for Twitter, which will pick up referrals to everyone on your contact list, than to you.
You will be able to come back to this later when your profile is ready, so my advice would be to skip this step for now, and. …
Create an Inviting Twitter Profile
Skip the instant searching and you'll be taken right into your profile.
At this stage, there won't be much to see. You'll have the default blue background. Your profile image will consist of the default brown square with the odd “o_O” logo inside. And you'll have no followers, you'll be following no one, and you'll have no updates.
A brand new Twitter profile. Think of it as a blank canvas on which you're about to create a marketing masterpiece and start at the very top, not the bottom.
What you will have, though, is a box in which you can make your first tweet, and a list of things that Twitter thinks you should do next.
You shouldn't do any of those things next. You certainly shouldn't start by telling “us what you're doing in the box above.”
Who's “us”?
Certainly not the people at Twitter. They aren't going to read every first tweet sent by every new Twitterer.
And certainly not your followers. You don't have any! Sending a tweet at this stage won't do you any harm, but it won't do you any good either. No one will read it.
And certainly not your followers. You don't have any! Sending a tweet at this stage won't do you any harm, but it won't do you any good either. No one will read it.
What Twitter calls “settings” actually offers a lot more than technical choices. It's one of the most important pages for successful Twitter marketing.
It's a bit like uploading a random Web page just to see what creating a Web page is like—and then leaving it up for all future users to see.
Forget about sending tweets for now.
Don't worry about finding some friends to follow.
And you certainly don't need to concern yourself about turning on your mobile to update your friends while you're on the go.
Instead, click the Settings link at the top of the page and give yourself a proper profile.
You'll be presented with a form that looks a lot like the sort of forms you're used to filling in on social media sites. You'll have a list of questions to answer that look simple, but actually require a little thought.
Name and Username
It starts with your name.
Yes, you should know your name, and that question shouldn't be hard. But it might be.
You probably have more than one name. You have a name. Your Web site might have a name. Your business might have a completely different name.
And that's assuming you just have one business and one Web site.
I've already pointed out the importance of choosing a username that can be typed directly into the browser. That's vital, and even though it's going to appear at the top of your profile page, it's never going to be pretty.
Because it's also a URL, whatever phrase you choose is going to appear as one word.
Your “name” will appear on the right of your Twitter page and reveals who you really are.
So before you type in your name, you have to decide which brand you want your Twitter page to represent.
Will the tweets be about what you're doing now or will they be about what your company or Web site is doing now?
Do you see the difference?
My followers tend to be people who want tips and advice about Internet marketing. When they look for that advice, they don't turn to my company, Infomedia. They look for me.
My Twitter profile, therefore, uses both my username and my real name, so that I'm easy to find and so that anyone reading my tweets understands that they're coming directly from me.
They're getting information that they can trust.
Note that on the right of this page, Twitter points out that you can change your username without affecting the tweets and messages you've already sent and received.
That doesn't mean you should just enter the first username you think of.
Although your current store of messages will be safe, you will have to tell your followers about the change. When you've got a lot of followers—and if you use the strategies in the next chapter, you will have a lot of followers—that's always going to be a real pain.
In fact, one good strategy when you join Twitter is to open multiple accounts so that you can tweet about different subjects on different timelines. Twitter doesn't allow cybersquatting—and Twitterers who have tried it have had their accounts suspended—but if you think you might need more than one account, then it's worth reserving your usernames sooner rather than later.
Twitter is becoming a popular place!
Your choice of name and username isn't going to be too difficult. If you have more than one identity or brand, it might take a little thought but usually, the choice should be fairly clear.
Your choice of e-mail is a lot easier.
This isn't an e-mail address that anyone is going to see. If people want to contact you through Twitter, they'll have to do it either by replying to one of your tweets or by sending you a direct message. But they won't see your e-mail address.
The address you enter here will only be used to receive information such as Twitter's newsletters and to change your password.
If you're the kind of person who tends to forget passwords, that second use can be pretty helpful! Make sure that you choose an e-mail address that you actually use.
Time Zone
Time on the Internet tends to be a pretty strange thing. Check your e-mail client and you might find all sorts of strange times attached to the e-mails you've received; often they look like they have no relationship at all to the time the message was sent.
Usually, that doesn't matter at all.
On Twitter though, because tweets describe what you're doing now, time is important.
So for the most recent posts, Twitter displays how long ago the tweets were sent. If a tweet is a day old though, the time stamp refers to the time the tweet was sent based on the time zone the follower entered on the settings page.
I think that's a bit confusing. I'd rather know what time of day the person I'm following sent his tweets.
Again, it's not a hard question, but I think this is one that Twitter got wrong.
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| Three different kinds of time stamp on my tweets as seen by a follower. One of them was right, but at least they're in the right order—and that's what counts! |
More Info URL
And now we come to something that's really crucial.
Twitter's profile appears to provide space to promote just one Web site. In fact, as I'll point out later in this section, with a little creativity, it's possible to promote all the Web sites you want.
But even then, one Web site—the link that appears beneath your name on the right of the screen—will always be the most prominent. It's the one that people will click to find out exactly who you are and what lies behind this Twitterer.
That makes the link very, very powerful.
Usually, you'll want to link to your main Web site. Sometimes though, you might want to change this link to suit a particular promotion. If you were promoting a new e-book or affiliate product, for example, you could tweet about it on Twitter and link from your profile to a landing page. Your tweets then would become another channel to bring potential buyers to your store.
Do you see how useful this can be?
One-Line Bio
So far, all of the fields I've discussed have been very, very simple.
They're very important—and you should know that they're much more important than they look—but none of them should have you scratching your head for more than a few seconds.
Your bio will take some effort, and a fair bit of thought, too.
Writing about yourself is never much fun. That's especially true when you're doing it for business. You have to find the things in your life that are interesting to others, make yourself appear professional, and do it all without boasting or sounding vain.
Usually, that's pretty hard.
Twitter makes it a real challenge—it only gives you 160 characters.
That's right, you get just 20 more characters than you have to write a tweet to describe your entire life history.
What a relief!
That means you can't go into detail, talk about all the things you've done and what you do for others. All you can do is choose one or two of the most important facts about you and write a sentence.
As an example, for a long time, my bio used to say:
“Husband, Father. Author. Speaker, Social Media Expert, Teacher. Generally Nice Guy.”
You could follow exactly the same model, or you could produce your own. If you published a sports Web site, for example, you could write something like:
“Football fan, youth coach, and all-round sports nut with bad knees.”
My bio as it used to appear on Twitter. Should I include my location here? Maybe, but it's not critical and might localize my brand too much
That's a very simple format: three one- or two-word phrases that describe who you are or what you do, followed by a short joke to finish it off.
If you wanted to create a bio like this, you don't have to do any more than fill in these blanks:
“[Professional description 1], [Professional description 2] and [Professional description 3] who likes to [Personal description.]”
A professional photographer looking to use Twitter to promote his services then, could easily use that format to create a bio that said:
“Wedding photographer, portrait pro, and creative artist who likes to photograph his kids at embarrassing moments.”
A landscape contractor could come up with a bio that looks like this:
“Tree surgeon, garden expert and green-fingered designer who likes to smell freshly-cut grass.”
And someone who blogs about sport could use that format to create this bio:
“Lakers fan, Yankees nut, and fantasy football coach who likes to tailgate downwind of the barbecues.”
Do you see how bios like these leave room for just two or three basic facts about you while still allowing space for a little personal touch? That's all you have room for on Twitter, and it's all you need.
If people want to find out more they'll have to come to your Web site. (I told you that link was going to be important!)
So one way of writing your Twitter bio is to summarize yourself in 160 characters. That's the approach I've chosen and it's a very simple one.
An alternative approach is to write a bio that discusses a particular project.
This is a very different use of Twitter. Instead of tweeting about yourself in general, you'll be tweeting on one theme—which you can then change when that project ends.
British comedy actor and writer Stephen Fry (twitter.com/stephenfry), for example, is known for being tech-savvy. He has a Web site that he updates frequently and on which he blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. He also tweets several times a day, even when he's working.
He probably does that mostly because he enjoys it—tweeting is fun, after all—but there's no question that his tweets also help to generate interest in his latest projects so that when they're released, they already have an audience.
In the fall of 2008, for example, the BBC sent Stephen Fry around the world to film a documentary series about endangered animals. Fry constantly changed his location to reflect where he was tweeting from and updated his bio to describe what he was doing at the time.
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| With almost 12,000 followers, British celebrity Stephen Fry is one of Twitter's top users. Look at how he uses his bio and his current location to promote his latest project |
His tweets still helped to promote his personal brand. They were still about what he was doing at the time (and yes, that included descriptions of what he was eating for breakfast at the hotel). But because the bio placed them in the context of a large project, those tweets were easier for new followers to understand, and they had a very strong promotional effect.
This is something that any marketer could do.
A photographer sent to Alaska for a week to shoot oil wells could change the location on his bio to reflect where he is now, and alter his bio to:
“Currently shooting oil wells in Alaska for Shell.”
A landscape contractor could edit his bio to describe a big project he's been hired to complete:
“Now designing the flowerbeds for Ventura's new Ben Sheffer Park.”
And someone who was writing an e-book about fantasy football could write this in his bio:
“Now working on the ultimate guide to real success with fantasy football.”
Since putting this book together, for example, I've changed my bio to emphasize my work with Twitter.
Bios like these look like tweets themselves—but they're not.
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| My current bio, which includes information about this book |
Tweets describe what you're doing at one particular moment. They can't describe what you're doing over a period that lasts days, weeks, or months. Your bio can do that, and when it does, it focuses your tweets onto that one project.
When you have a lot of followers, it can be a very powerful way of promoting your work.
Location
After asking you to sum up your life in 160 characters, Twitter then asks “Where in the world are you?”
We've already seen how changing your location to reflect where you happen to be working on a particular project can be very helpful.
Usually though, you'll be working in the same place most of the time, so you should be a little careful here.
I don't try to hide the fact that I live in Loveland, Colorado. In fact, I talk about it quite a lot on my blog. It's a beautiful place and I feel very blessed that I'm able to live here.
But my products have nothing to do with my location. When I attend conferences, I meet people from around the country, and I know that my books, courses, and products are used by people around the world.
I don't think that placing my location on my bio would really affect my branding, but I don't want people to feel that my work is somehow connected to Colorado. It isn't, so I chose to leave it off.
If there's a chance that your location could localize your work, then you might want to leave the location off, too.
Protect My Updates
I'll skip the language setting because that's pretty self-explanatory. The last option on this page, though, is perhaps the most important of all.
Twitter's last question is whether you want to keep your tweets confidential so that only the people you approve see them, or whether you're prepared to let anyone at all see them.
If you're using Twitter for marketing, do not click this box.
You want to let anyone who wants to see your tweets. You want as many people as possible to come to your Twitter page, realize that you have fantastic, interesting tweets that they want to read, and sign up to be your followers.
If people can't see your updates, they're not going to sign up. You'll be restricted to tweeting to the friends, family, and contacts that you've chosen.
That's like a store owner hanging a “closed” sign on the door and only dealing with her friends.
If you want to tweet only about personal stuff, that's fine. But it's a different use of Twitter. If you want to use Twitter to build your brand and grow your business, then leave that box unchecked.
Choosing Your Twitter Picture
All of your profile information is reached by clicking the Settings link at the top of the page, and is listed under the tab marked Account.
All of your profile information is reached by clicking the Settings link at the top of the page, and is listed under the tab marked Account.
There are six Settings tabs all together, but for now I want to skip past the Password, Devices, and Notices settings, and continue with the tabs that relate to your profile—the way you'll appear to followers.
I believe that you should first prepare your page before you start sending and receiving tweets. Once you've completed your bio (and yes, you can change it later if you're not completely satisfied with it), your next step should be to upload a picture.
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| Twitter places your bio information under the Account tab and separates Picture and Design. |
You will need to upload a picture to your Twitter profile.
There's no getting around this step.
If you don't add a photo to your profile, you'll appear on the page as two strange circles. That's not very attractive, and worst of all, it makes you look like you're not serious about your time on Twitter.
When people add their photos, they'll expect to see yours in return.
And it has to be a good picture too, one that portrays you as both professional and personable—exactly what your tweets should be doing.
Remember, though, that the picture itself is going to appear very small, so it's a good idea to use a close-up of your face that makes you recognizable, even when you're no bigger than a thumbnail. Try to include a full-body shot and your expression will probably appear no larger than a couple of millimeters on someone's screen.
You'll usually be better off with a good portrait that shows you smiling and at ease.
That's easier said than done, and in practice people make a lot of mistakes here.
Spend any time at all on social networking sites and you'll see photograph after photograph that look blurry or are just plain inappropriate. Here are number of guidelines to follow when adding your picture to any social media site, including Twitter:
Don't hold the camera yourself.
Showing your arm doesn't look cool. In fact, it looks like you couldn't find a friend to hold the camera for you, or you don't know how to work the camera's self-timer. Neither of those create good impressions—and neither creates good pictures either.
The pictures that I use on my social media sites have all been professionally shot. If you're serious about marketing with social media that's something you might want at least to consider too. You can either visit a local photography studio or use BetterBusinessShots.com, a service that will send you to a local hand-picked photographer who will shoot a selection of portraits specifically for online use at prices that start at $99.
Alternatively, you can just ask someone to lend you a hand so that you don't have to show your arm.
Use a good camera.
Many laptops today come with built-in webcams. Desktop Web cameras are almost as standard as a keyboard and mouse, and even the cheapest mobile phone comes complete with a lens, e-mail facility, and practically a portable photography studio, too.
Don't use them.
Cameras like these tend to produce low-quality images with lots of distortion. They're hard to focus and often produce images that are grainy rather than clear.
If you want to video conference with a friend or a business partner on the other side of the country, your webcam will do a fine job. I use mine all the time.
If you want to snap your friends at a birthday dinner, your mobile phone is just the ticket.
But when you're creating a portrait that will represent you on a social media site, use a real camera. Nothing else is good enough.
Keep the backgrounds to a minimum.
Because you have such a tiny amount of space to squeeze your picture into, anything in the background is going to interfere with the most important item in the frame: you.
Ideally, your features should fill most of the frame. And behind you, there should be just about nothing.
You might be able to get away with a horizon line, the sea, or the sky but if the background is busy in any way—if it shows trees, parts of buildings, or your car—it's going to distract from your portrait and look unfocused.
Find a nice white wall or a good high balcony and stand your friend, with the camera, directly in front of you.
Show yourself.
And finally, use your picture, not a photograph of your cat, your dog, your hamster, your favorite comic book hero, or some squiggle that you feel might do a good job of representing you.
If you're tweeting on behalf of your company, then you can get away with using your company logo. Other than that though, you'll need to use your photograph.
Social media is all about personal branding. It's about the connections you build as an individual and how you work that network.
To create those connections, you can't be a wallflower. You need to show your face. So shy or not, you need to upload a picture to your profile.
And it has to be a good one!
Designing Your Twitter Profile
Now we really get down to business.
When it comes to choosing your profile picture, there's really only one option. You want to make it a close-up of your face, and make it fill the frame so that no one has to squint to look at you.
Now we really get down to business.
When it comes to choosing your profile picture, there's really only one option. You want to make it a close-up of your face, and make it fill the frame so that no one has to squint to look at you.
Your profile design, though, is a lot more complicated.
I've pointed out that Twitter leaves you very little room for creativity in your bio. You're not going to be able to say too much when you only have 160 characters.
And the site is very tightfisted with the links too. Most of us have more than one site we'd like to promote, and it would also be good to bring Twitter's users into our Facebook network, Flickr streams, and MySpace pages. Being forced to place just one link on your profile is like taking a kid to a candy store and telling him he can only choose one piece of candy.
Why restrict your followers to just one marketing channel?
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| Twitter's profile design options are a lot more flexible—and much more useful—than they look. |
The background image gives you a chance to have it all.
But you'll have to do a bit of planning.
Twitter gives you a selection of twelve background images to choose from.
You don't want to choose any of them. You want to create your own background and upload it by clicking the Change background image link beneath Twitter's designs.
Instead of leaving the left side of your Twitter page blank or filled with some strange design, you want to use that space to promote your business.
That strip is valuable real estate, and not using it as good as leaving money on the table.
This what my Twitter profile looks like. Take a look at the left side of the screen. You can think of it as having four separate sections.
The first section is the top-left hand corner. This is where the page begins so it needs to function as an introduction. It should say who you are and indicate with a glance what you do.
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| Change your background image and start building on your Twitter real estate. |
On my profile, I've done that with a stylized version of my name and a descriptive tag line. You could also put your logo here.
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| My specially constructed Twitter background explains who I am, promotes my sites and my books, and sends people to my Twitter survey. What will yours do? |
Remember that unlike a conventional Web page, this won't be the first place the user will look. Your latest tweet will always be far more prominent and draw the eye first. The user will then look at the top left-hand corner in order to be able to see at a glance who is providing these tweets.
That means this corner should contain an image or text that's visually enticing and which draws the viewer down the column.
Directly beneath that, I've created an information column.
This is just a vertical bar that runs alongside my tweets and tells my followers basic information about me and—even more importantly—where they can go to find out more.
At the top of the sidebar, I've placed a second picture of myself.
You don't have to place a picture there if you don't want to. It depends on the nature of your business and what you're promoting with Twitter.
If you're promoting your personal brand, then using an image that's larger than the tiny box provided for your profile can be very helpful.
People will see your profile thumbnail on someone else's Twitter page then click it to see who you are. They'll reach your profile and by seeing a second photo will feel that they're getting more than the simple introduction the thumbnail provides. They'll feel that they're getting a peek behind the scenes of your business.
If you're promoting a product or a brand though, you could place a picture of that product here, or simply go straight into the text on the information bar.
That begins with a brief introduction. One option is to explain what followers will receive if they continue reading your tweets.
An introduction like this provides information about the benefits of becoming a follower, says something about what you do, and also functions as a “call to action,” encouraging people to hit that Follow button.
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| An invitation and a further introduction. |
You can use the same format in your own information bar. If you wanted your Twitter page to promote a blog about your travel experiences, you could write:
“Follow me as I travel the world, visit ancient sites and eat some very strange food.”
It's very simple and it can be very effective.
An alternative approach is to do something even simpler. You can thank the user for following you and send him off to learn more about you. That's the approach I now take in my sidebar.
What could possibly be easier than that?
The bulk of the information bar is just a list of links that tell followers where they can go to discover more. Again, this is very simple, but it could well be the most important part of your Twitter presence.
You can have all the followers you want. You could have tens of thousands of people reading your tweets every day and telling all their friends about you. But if that's all they do, they're going to be of no use to you.
You need them to come to your other Web sites. You need them to click your ads, purchase your products, or subscribe to your services.
You need them to help you make money—and that's not going to happen directly on Twitter. It can only happen by sending them to your other sites.
This sidebar is the place to tell them where they can find those sites.
Note how I provide lots of different options, and how I use headings to make the differences between those options clear.
This is a very different strategy from one that you might be using on your Web site. There, you're more likely to use just a few external links so that you can control where your users go and so that those links don't compete with your ads.
Here's the secret…
Your sidebar is actually an ad. It functions just like a Google AdSense unit—but it's your Google AdSense unit.
AdSense is probably the most used advertising network on the Internet. Operated by Google, the system's ads, delivered automatically and contextualized to match the page content, are what turned the search engine company into a multibillion-dollar corporation.
And I'm pleased to say that I, and thousands of others, have enjoyed a great deal of success with them. I wrote about strategies and techniques for using Google's multi-billion dollar ad program at length in my previous title, The AdSense Code (2006—Morgan James Publishing.)
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| It's not AdSense, but it works like AdSense … almost. |
The design is different, but the principle is exactly the same. You're tweets are your content—good content, of course—and the ad runs alongside it. Naturally, it looks nothing like an ad so that people actually want to look at it, not run away from it.
That's the foundation of smart AdSense implementation, and it works in exactly the same way with these homemade “ads” on Twitter.
And just as an AdSense unit usually includes lots of different links, so that readers have a choice and are likely to find at least one of them interesting, so your sidebar is more likely to tempt your readers if it's filled with lots of different URLs.
So the headings tell people what sort of content they can find on those sites, and directly beneath those headings are the URLs themselves.
There is however one very important difference between your Twitter sidebar and an AdSense unit:
You can't click the links in your sidebar.
It's just an image. It doesn't do anything except provide a background to your tweet timeline.
Clearly, that's a huge weakness. You can do something to get around it with some smart design work. I've made the headings and keywords in my information bar blue so that they look like links.
They might not function as links, but they will be as eye-catching as links.
Note that I didn't make the URLs themselves blue. That would be misleading. Followers might want to click them, and they'd be irritated when they find that they can't.
The best I can do to help guide them to my Web sites is to make the heading stand out in standard link blue, and create enough curiosity with my tweets to make followers type the URL into the browser to learn more.
And finally, at the bottom of the page, I've highlighted one particular link that I would really like my Twitter users to follow. In this case, it's my Twitter survey—much of the information from which went into this book.
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| The bottom of my information bar gives a final kick to my promotions. |
Whenever you want to promote a new product, all you have to do is edit your background image and change the information about the product page.
If you're thinking that I should have put that promotion at the top of my information bar, then think again.
Your most important product should go at the top of the information bar—the brand that you want most to promote. In the case of my Twitter page, that's my personal brand.
My Twitter page isn't about my Twitter survey. It's about me, so my brand goes at the top of the page. The Twitter survey is the second most important item I'd like to promote, so that goes at the bottom of the page, together with an image, so that it stands out.
Designing a Commercial Background Image for Twitter
Or rather the design is simple, because creating your background image can be a little technical.
It's not very technical but if, like me, you know absolutely nothing about graphic design you might want to outsource the image production itself to a professional designer.
Supply the mock-up, explain what you want the image to include, and let the designer do the hard work of making sure all the figures add up—because your design will need to have all the right dimensions if it's going to succeed.
Hugh Briss, for example, offers customized Twitter backgrounds through his Web site, TwitterImage.com. Prices start from $75, and he's already created beautiful backgrounds for some of Twitter's biggest users, including Chris Pirillo (twitter.com/chrispirillo) and blogging expert Darren Rowse (twitter.com/problogger).
That's the easiest option. But actually, there are a whole bunch of different ways of creating a background image for Twitter, and some of them are very easy indeed.
If I can do it, no one has an excuse!
1 Do it all yourself. The hard way is to open up Photoshop (or Gimp or Paint.Net, if you prefer to use a simpler graphics program that doesn't cost anything) and get designing.
Here's what you need to know:
The maximum size for the image is 800kb.
The image dimensions can be flexible. Mine is , which is standard and does the job. Stretching it to
18981593×20481707×, though, would make sure it fills even the biggest screens.
The dimensions of the sidebar on the left are
80pixels587× pixels.
The top of the Twitter logo is 14 pixels from the top of the page. Place the highest point of your first image on the same line and it will be level with the logo.
Note that while you can put a sidebar—or anything else—on the right side of the page too, there's no guarantee that it will appear on screens with different sizes; on small screens, it could be hidden by the Twitter timeline. If you're putting the sidebar on the left, adding information on the right might also be distracting: you just want your users to see your links and your tweets, then surf on to find more. Hugh Briss, though, has come up with some pretty neat designs that use both sides of the screen.
If you've got skills with colors, shapes, and design programs, then you can use these figures to get creative. If you don't, you can keep things simple.
2 Use a free template. Twitterer Wayne Sutton (twitter.com/waynesutton) has uploaded a free template that anyone can download and use as a foundation for their own backgrounds.
You can download the template file from Box.net at www.box.net/shared/lgw2pz4gso. Having saved the file, you'll be able to open it and start making the changes you want to the picture and the text.
That will give you the sidebar, but it won't give you a unique background design for the rest of the page. Fortunately there are a number of ways to deal with that, too.
3 Use a free background design. Designer Natalie Jost (twitter.com/natalie) is giving away a bunch of beautiful background patterns at TwitterPatterns.com. You can only use them on your Twitter page—so no using them on your Web site without paying Natalie for her work first—but there are some beautiful choices there.
Alternatively, GrungeTextures.com also offers a big selection of textures and backgrounds that you can use under a Creative Commons license.
4 Use my background as a template. Want to see what someone's background image looks like without all of the Twitter stuff on it?
Right click anywhere on the Twitter page and you'll be given a list of menu items. One of those menu items is “View background image.”