December 2013

Signing up for a new Twitter account, you’ll find that the default profile is decidedly generic. Your profile picture is a nondescript egg laid by the Twitter bird. Your header is black, and not horrible, and your page background is very Twitter-like.

Clearly an individual or business looking to distinguish their brand on social media will need to replace the existing graphics with something much more memorable. But what to use, and what size of images are required?

Profile Picture

If you are branding a company, use your logo, or a representative image. Because your profile picture is going to be pretty small in some applications, it might be better to use a stylized letter, or an image representing what you sell rather than a long-ish text logo. For example, golden arches make a better McDonald’s profile picture than the full name of the company. If the arches weren’t available, a photo of a Big Mac might be the next best thing.

If the Twitter account is for a person, show your face. Get a nice close head-shot, and try to keep your whole head intact rather than cropping a little off the top. Leave that to your barber.

You can upload a fairly large profile picture to Twitter, and it will get resized or cropped to your specifications. 160X160 is a pretty fair size to start with. It won’t be shown that large unless someone goes looking closely at the picture, but it’s large enough to have a really clear look at what’s there.

There are a few things you should check before committing to a Twitter profile picture.

1. It needs to be square. Make sure the image looks good cropped as such, or you might end up losing some vital bits of your head or your company logo.
   
2. It needs to be readable/distinguishable at the smallest size it will be shown. Using an image editor, shrink your chosen profile image to about 30X30 pixels. Can you read any words in it? Is your face recognizable or are you too far in the background? If you can’t see it clearly, start again with a new image.
   
3. It needs to represent you or your company. Random images, and switching things up can be fun, but it can keep your Twitter contributions from being recognized, retweeted and/or favourited.

Header Background

The next most important image is what Twitter calls your “header.” The default image for your header is a black cross-hatch background that doesn’t look too bad… but that doesn’t mean you should leave it at that. This header is the biggest piece of branding that many followers and potential followers will see. It shows up in the profile summary that pops up when a user clicks your name, and it’s the main image for people viewing twitter via mobile apps.

Things to remember about header backgrounds are:

1. They’re going to be written on in white text, so they can’t be too light.
   
2. Nor should they be so distracting your intro text and url are not noticeable on the screen.
   
3. They should be 1252X626 pixels, and no more than 5 mb in size.

Background Theme

The final graphic that you can customize on your Twitter profile is your page background image and theme. While you can go very large and elaborate with this, or tile something simple, what often works very well is a simple, solid colored background with an aligned-left logo and/or call to action.

As long as the image on the left hand size of your background isn’t much larger than 75 to 100 pixels wide, most people viewing it on a desktop or laptop will be able to see it very well.

Be sure, when you’re setting up your image, to set the background colour to match (unless you’re tiling the background), and using a contrasting yet complementary colour for links.

Taken all together, the images that form your Twitter identity can make a powerful impact, so be sure to take advantage of them.

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