Nothing looks more professional on your Twitter page than an attractive, custom designed background that provides additional information about you or your business. And while many graphic artists, web designers and social media consultants will be happy to make one for you, it is not all that hard to make one yourself. Here are some of my insights into that process.
First,if you do not have Adobe Photoshop or something similar with which to design your custom background, don’t worry. There are free online services that will help you to create your background. One of the most popular of those services is TwitBack. TwitBack is free, easy to use and will allow you to create a pretty good looking custom image.
For those of you who have Adobe Photoshop or similar software, it is not too hard to create a very good looking custom background. There are a lot of very good free tutorials on that process at YouTube. One video tutorial that helped me is included here.
Here are a couple of tips that are really important to remember when creating your custom background.
- Once you create an image, it is easy to upload it to Twitter from your Twitter account at the Settings page from the menu in the upper right part of the Twitter home page. Go to Settings, then Design, then Change Background Image.
- Twitter does not allow you to upload any image larger than 800k. Frankly, I’ve had trouble uploading and using anything bigger than 700k, so I would stick to less than 700k for an image size.
- For your business, you might want to consider adding your web address, physical address and hours to your image. Think of it like a Yellow Pages listing!
- What you see yourself is not necessarily what your customer sees. A relatively safe strategy is to keep important information in your custom Twitter background within 175 pixels of the left hand column. However, high resolution monitors that can display very wide images will give you some additional real estate to the right hand side of your screen. A good example of using the right hand real estate (for those who can see it) is from the Twitter page of Alyssa Milano. Notice that the important info she wants to share is crunched into the left hand column, but she also shares some cute pics of herself to the far right.
Tags: background, custom, twitback, twitter
