There has been a huge serge from main stream business marketing their businesses on Twitter, and no surprise! With any social media marketing for your business you want to have a professional online presence. Many social networks allow for the modification of their default theme, and Twitter is no exception. But you want to take it to the next level. You want your background to stand out and set you apart. Making use of a custom-designed background will create a substantial impact. What does your Twitter background say about your business?

Are you taking full advantage of free prime online advertising real estate?

Your Twitter background is increasingly a prime advertising space, and you only have a few seconds to capture visitors interest, so let’s take a look at how you can design your Twitter background.

Let’s first start with the information you wish to convey. You will want to include your business name, perhaps a logo, textual links to your business website or possibly other social network URLs. Other information you can include a short bio, contact information or a photo of yourself. Next you want to consider your palette, and color for the sidebar. All of these elements will display to the left hand side of the Twitter post area.

For a more professional and cleaner look (for those who want to use Twitter as a marketing tool), don’t include any tile on the image. You can use imaging software such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to create your background. You need to create a large image that can occupy the computer screen but without tiling.

It is suggested that you create a background image;

Image Size: 2040px x 1700px
Branding Area: 80px x 587px
Coordinates: X=2-, Y=14
Horizontal: 20px from left
Vertical: 20px from top
File Size: <800k
File Type: Gif, JPG, PNG

For your sidebar, you can line up your images or photos, business info, and website; this bar begins on the upper left-hand side of your image. It can also include your name, job title, blog URL, specialty, social network URL, and other important information.

Save you image as a jpeg or if you wish to have a faster loading image, save it as a gif. Once you have saved your image, login to your Twitter account. On the upper right, click on ‘Settings’. From there you will want to click on the ‘Design’ tab. Click on the link ‘change background image’. By clicking on ‘browse’, you can now find the image that you’ve previously created. Leave the tile check-box unchecked. Finally, click on ‘save changes’. After several seconds, you will have a custom Twitter background image.

Your background on Twitter tells a lot about your personality. If you plan to use Twitter for online marketing, make the background more professional as well as making sure that it suits your image and personality. There are many editing programs that you can use aside from Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro so choose the program you are familiar with and will aid you in creating the background you are looking for.

For a seriously professional look to your business Twitter page you can hire the services of a talented graphic designer that you would no doubt be able to find on Twitter they will ensure your image and branding represent your business. Most will even upload the files for you and manage other setup aspects on request.

If you are uncomfortable with creating your own image, there are a few resources on the web to help you accomplish your goal:

Twitter Gallery – Fun and interesting background designs, not able to modify, free and ready to use
Free Twitter Designer – Personalize your Twitter background that have the same look and feel as those done by professional graphic designers – free and easy to use

Twitter Business Women have been able to secure our readers a whopping 20% discount on a Twitter background design through Australian graphic designers Typengraphics. To claim your discount simple contact Typengraphics and quote the special codeword;

If you’ve done any reading on the Twitter marketing, you probably realize that tweeting can be an effective, cost-free or low-cost solution for marketing your business. All too often however, we may be left wondering what to tweet about our businesses. We are under the mistaken impression that we simply have nothing worthy of sharing.

A good tweet can not only inform your followers about new developments in your company, but it can also educate, inform, or entertain them. Once you achieve visibility, both your company profile and your client prospect levels will rise. The word of mouth that can come from a particularly intelligent tweet or series of tweets can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in free advertising.

If you provide tweets that are informative and inspirational to your followers, you’ll gain credibility and be on your way to forming a valuable relationship. This can be very powerful from a marketing point of view.

If you’re looking for things to tweet about in relation to your business, consider some of these ideas. This is a list of 20 reasons to tweet about your business and help you get started today in utilizing this amazing promotional strategy for your business:

1. Starting a new business
2. Celebrating a company anniversary
3. Publishing of a new article or series of articles
4. Publishing of a new blog post related to your business
5. Publishing of a book or ebook
6. Promote a book signing
7. Receiving an award
8. Announcing a partnership
9. Promote a specific product, service, event, contest or fundraiser
10. Promote a product or service that is holiday themed
11. Promote a sale or holiday sale
12. Promote a campaign using your company products that promotes a cause or creates awareness about something important
13. Announce that you’re available to speak on particular subjects of interest
14. Promote a public appearance on television, radio or in person
15. Launching of a website or blog
16. Website or blog anniversary
17. Announce free information or resources are available
18. Sponsoring a workshop, seminar, conference or teleseminar
19. Announcement of a new strategic partnership or alliance
20. Webinar or Success Cast interview with you

While there are many other reasons to tweet, these ideas should help you jumpstart your creativity.

But if you need more marketing resources also read Twitter As A Marketing Tool, it is packed with great tools and tips for using twitter in your business.

Cheers
Leigh Kostiainen

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PSS: If you haven’t already, nominate yourself or one of your Twitter followers to be a Twitter Business Women success story.