Why You Should Use a Custom Twitter Background

Posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 5:17 pm.

Here are some quick and useful tips for effectively branding your Twitter profile by using a customised background image. It’s important to consistently present your company’s brand across the different media platforms.

 

What are the benefits of a custom Twitter background?

It instantly conveys to people who find your page that you’re active on Twitter

You take care to manage your account and that there are more than likely to have real human beings at the other end who will respond.

People instantly recognise who the profile belongs to based on the cross associations triggered by your visual branding.

You can easily incorporate and clearly present important contact information such as email addresses, telephone numbers and your website address without resorting to crowding your limited bio box with all this extra information.

 

What you need to know

Twitter recently updated its website with a newly refreshed and re-proportioned layout, so this means that if you were already using a background image that this may no longer fit or display as it might have done in the past, better go and check!

For a more in depth guide on creating a twitter background we recommend you read the post on creating backgrounds for the new twitter as the information here was used to inform how the background for Hallam was made optimal for our own needs.

 

Best Practise

Branding your Twitter background can be as simple as using your main company colour and logo to brand consistently and effectively, this is precisely what we chose to do at Hallam in our example above.

If you want to use photography or imagery within your background to create visual impact it’s not a good idea to tile your image as this will look cheap and be visually distracting. Yes, people do still do this.

Instead I recommend you either keep your imagery within the visible area (180 pixels wide) or use a large image/photo to convey a particular look and feel for your page.

Remember you can convey your important messages through both text and image, but too much text will lose its effectiveness to communicate effectively—don’t assume everybody will read it. Ask yourself if this feels right for your company or organisation…

Different monitors and different screen resolutions mean you will want to account for a degree of flexibility within your Twitter background design.

This essentially means not relying on it looking pixel precise to everybody, as it is unrealistic to say the least.

It’s still common today for websites to be built and optimised for 1024×768 screen resolutions, however applying the same rules to Twitter will mean you’re left with very little space to display anything because the vast majority will be covered and obscured by Twitter’s own layout— this would lead to a wasted branding opportunity.

I strongly recommend you make your background design optimal when displayed under the resolutions using 1280 as the horizontal width.

This resolution is typical for the flat screens many businesses will be using and is further backed up by statistics from W3C in terms of overall resolution use. Any resolution above this is usually a bonus.

I made sure our important information fits within the 180 pixel space afforded, whilst we accept some of our services listed do indeed get clipped, however we believe the advantages of using this space negates the disadvantages of not having everything always showing to everybody.

Good luck with creating your background, if you’re interested in Hallam helping with the branding your Twitter profile as part of our social media services then I would love to hear from you.

 

Further Reading

Eight Tips for Improving Interaction on Twitter

Twitter Phishing Scams to Avoid