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;

Social media and marketing methods have become an important part of business success. Business owners are finding that services like Twitter can help to get the message out about their companies, connect them to their customers and clients and bolster their bottom lines with a higher ROI.

With Twitter’s increasing popularity come hundreds of tools and applications to help manage one’s tweets. If you are using Twitter for business, there are many applications that can be used as effective marketing tools. Twitter applications allow you to track the links you share, schedule tweets, welcome new followers, organize and monitor your followers, offer coupons, the list goes on and on.

We’ve sorted through the seemingly unending list of Twitter apps to bring you eighteen of the most popular Twitter tools;

TweetLater – Schedule tweets, track keywords, welcome new followers
TwitterContd – Gives you more than 140 characters, upload photos, shorten URLs
Tweepler – Organize your followers
Monitter – Monitor keywords on Twitter
TwitterMass – Enables you to connect and communicate with your target audience
TwitterToolbar – Giving you access to a variety of tools & resources
TwitThis – Add a TwitThis button to your website or blog so visitors can easily tweet about your company
TweetBurner – Track links you share
Trendistic – See the trending topics on Twitter
CoTweet – Platform that aids companies in reaching customers, multiple accounts and users
Twitoria – Reduce Twitter’s clutter by revealing friends that haven’t posted in a while or track down spammers
Twiggit – Updates your Twitter status with your latest Diggs
BubbleTweet – Add a video welcome to your Twitter page
Twitter Gallery – Free Twitter backgrounds and themes
TwitPic – Share photos on Twitter
twtQpon – Enhance your marketing by offering coupons to your followers
TwitterHawk – Targeted marketing that will find people tweeting about a chosen topic and location
TweetBeep – Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, and your company

There just has to be a tool there to solve just about any Twitter business and marketing problem.

Cheers

Leigh Kostiainen

PS: Sign up for our news & stay in touch by connecting with fabulous Twitter Business Women success stories.