Make a Custom Twitter Background
Twitter includes a lot of standard options for sprucing up your profile and while they do a fine job, many users want a little something more. We want to express ourselves and while 20 themes certainly is a fair amount to choose from, we require our individuality! It’s not even a little bit difficult to create your own background for Twitter, and you’ve got options as far as how you can to do just that. But there are important things to consider before diving in.
Why Do You Need a Custom Twitter Background?
There are lots of different reasons you might want to customize your Twitter profile, but one of the most useful motivations is raising brand awareness. Taking advantage of all the non-white white space is absolutely essential and anyone with a sense of design will know that immediately upon viewing their own profile. Following are some industries or people who may find a special Twitter background very useful:
- Local Restaurants on Twitter should absolutely have a custom image that displays important information such as the location, email and telephone contact information, hours of operation and the daily specials, depending on whether you want to rotate or modify your background image on a daily basis.
- Ecommerce Websites on Twitter would do well to create their own custom background images that display their logo, contact information and links to important pages such as support, new products, popular products and more. Users are unable to click these links inside the browser but if they’re short and clear, the URL can be entered into the browser instead.
- Branding Yourself is much more common now in the age of social media networking. Everyone has something to pimp, something to sell, or some advice to convey to their audience. As one person, it’s important for you to put your best foot forward. Your Twitter background can double as a sort of business card that shows your image, contact info, website or blog or what ever other important information your audience needs to know.
How Can I Make My Own Twitter Background?
If you really don’t know the first thing about operating a graphics program and have hit a wall with regard to brainstorming a simple design, you can always pay someone to make you a custom Twitter profile background. TwitterStyle is just one service that offers basic and custom designs and although I haven’t tried it, I’ve seen some examples of their work and it looks like they give you options so that you get the most for your money.
If you’re like me and you’d rather just make it yourself, you can do it quickly and easily. You could put the extra work in to design a full background that will span the entire Twitter page, but you’ll need to take some time to make sure your creative shows up and isn’t blocked by the existing content sections on your profile page. The easier way is to design a sort of side bar that will only populate the left portion of the page. Here are some of the more important things to consider:
- Graphics Software is pretty important when you’re designing a graphic to be used online. I know that seems obvious but you’d be surprised what goes right over the collective head of the Internet. Whether you’re using Paint or one of the powerful and extremely useful paid products like Photoshop Elements 8, you’ll want to be sure you can create a graphic.
- Screen Resolution can be an issue when you’re designing a graphic that depends on pre-existing objects on a page. You don’t want your LinkedIn web URL running off behind your tweet feed, nor do you want your graphic so crushed and narrow that the text isn’t even readable. 96% of all browsers on the Internet today have a display resolution of 1024 x 768 so you’re safe if you design based on that resolution. That remaining 4% will just have to deal with it.
- The Right Information is paramount to hooking those browsers of your Twitter profile and turning them into your loyal following. Make sure the information you’re providing in your profile background is pertinent to the message you convey, and make sure that your contact information is visible, readable, and correct!
- Color Coordinate your background image so that it falls in line with your background color. If your Twitter background is set to white, then you should probably set your image to white as well. This way you can make the image as small as you like so as not to burden the page load time of your profile.
The above information will definitely put you on the right track to creating a Twitter background image that can reach out and hook your page visitors and turn them into followers. My custom Twitter profile image is just 310 x 360 pixels but those dimensions can easily be tweaked to suit your creative desires. Good luck, and send any inspired custom Twitter profile backgrounds this way!
