It’s Day 6 of the 1,000 followers campaign and now that I’m continuing to build a following on twitter, it’s time to get away from the generic look of my twitter page. On day 1 all I did to customize things was to add a description of myself and upload my picture to get away from the generic twitter icon. Generally when people are making their decision to follow you or not they will look at two things, the first is the quality, topic, frequency and history of your tweets and the second factor is the design of your twitter profile. Customizing your twitter page is also a great way to maintain a consistent brand, feature more detailed contact info, sell a product, or just focus your creativity into a 300×1000 pixel space. Today when I tweaked my page, I tried to achieve each of these objectives in one fell swoop.

To begin customizing my page, I started by clicking on the ‘settings’ tab once logged in. I then went straight to the ‘design’ tab in the setting section. Once in the design area you can choose to select one of 20 pre-loaded twitter themes, but since I’m trying to incorporate my branding I’m going to choose the more custom options below. I next clicked on “change design colors” and changed the colors for my page’s background, text, links, sidebar and sidebar border, once happy with that I clicked ‘save changes’ and then clicked on the “change background image” link. In this option you are able to create an image (no larger than 800k) that you use as your personal background. Although you can tile your background image, I recommend making a background image that you only use once and flows into the background color you have chosen in the design colors section. One thing to remember if you are creating a background – if you want to optimize it for maximum user visibility, any content or feature images of your background should be no wider than 200-300px from the left side of your image, anything wider than that, and the image will be tucked behind the main twitter content box. In my case I created an image that’s 1200×1200 px wide but faded into a charcoal grey colour (#2a2a2a to be exact) on the right and bottom edges of the image.

In general you want to use your background image as a teaser to your followers to entice them to learn more about you at your website or blog, don’t make it a sales pitch as it’s a quick turn-off. A small sized tiled image can often have a negative effect as well as it is quite distracting from the main content of your page. Take a look at my profile picture and let me know what you think. If you would like your own customized twitter background send an email to info@qtweb.ca and I would be happy to give you some pointers or design one for you for a reasonable cost.

Day 6 Recap

Following: 854
Followers: 642

Time spent – 1 Hour (3 ½ out of 10 remaining)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 and is filed under Twitter: 1000 Followers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.