Pommie Travels

How to Customize Your Twitter Background

Lately I took the plunge and customized my Twitter background. Twitter is not just another social networking site, it has become a useful business and marketing tool, particularly for travel bloggers.

Is Twitter worth it?

Many people who sign up for twitter either write one Tweet, don’t really get it and never Tweet again, or they become an avid Twitterer. It can be a little confusing and difficult to understand at first, but Twitter can be a really good way to network and get followers for your blog or website.

How do I get followers?

Start following people! Think about people you like or are interested in, whether it’s celebrities, other travel bloggers, people in your industry or your friends. Many websites now have a “follow me on twitter” page so follow the link and start following them! You can do keyword searches in the search box on the home page, so for instance if you are a travel writer living in Bali like me, you might do a search for ‘travel’ and ‘bali’. If people follow you, it is polite to follow back as sometimes people will stop following if they don’t feel you are reciprocating.

Write interesting tweets! Don’t just bombard people with links to your website or annoy people with hundreds of tweets all at once. Write about something exciting that you are doing, something humorous, or something that may start a debate or discussion. Asking questions on Twitter is always bound to get people talking.

Discover the @!

It took me a while to discover this and I didn’t even know how it worked! If you want to direct your tweet at someone in particular or respond to something they have said @ them! Either click the reply button or put @(username). People will see this and it will encourage more followers. And if you find someone else’s tweet interesting and think it’s worth of a mention Retweet it!

Twitter is all about getting involved in the conversation with the Twitter community, so the more involved you are, the more followers you will get. Join the conversation! Add a ‘follow me on twitter’ widget on your travel blog to encourage people to follow you too.

Put a # before a keyword in your post to join in a ‘trending topic’- a topic that’s popular and being talked about that day.

Creating a Custom Background

Customising your Twitter background allows you to maintain a professional appearance and also gives you the opportunity to market your brand, show off your design skills and include information that you can’t necessarily include in the small word count on your profile.

• Create a custom document in Adobe Photoshop. Because Twitter has the tweet page down the middle, your Twitter followers are only going to see what is down the left and the right hand side. So you want to make sure your images and text fall in those areas.
• Your document size should be something around 1283 pixels by 615 pixels, that’s what size mine was.
• Allow yourself a width of around 240 pixels for everything you put in the left hand column.
• Allow yourself around 270 pixels for everything you put in the right hand column.
• Get creating!
• Start with the background, do you want a gradient, solid colour, texture…?
• Think about the information that you would like to display, for instance your contact details, what you do or your website address.
• Perhaps you would like to include your company logo, a photo of yourself or if your business is in design you might want to create something completely new and show off your skills.
• Save your pdf as a jpeg image and upload it to Twitter!