Personalisation
It is time to get personal.
In this key step, step 2, we are going to take you through the process and all the ins and outs of personalising your twitter profile, to make it both uniquely yours and to focus each account on your specific area of business.
Click here to read through the Introduction
Twitter.com/log in/Settings/Picture
It is a must for you to have a photograph on your profile. To not have a picture is a sing of being new and as yet un interesting. There are more people to talk to and if are seen to have not uploaded a picture, then you are probably not going to have an advanced account, your perception from the begninning is less than interesting.
When we first set up the Weboptimiser account, we used the company logo, or more accurately the spinner part of the logo. At the same time our CEO set up a personal Twitter account and he added his picture from the beginning, now he is a top 100 twitterer. Weboptimiser is not.
Before we put up a picture (of me) we used to get emails saying it was weird being followed by a company and were we robots? Since changing over to a picture – and making our company Twitter account more human, our number of followers have risen and the world is a better place, it would seem.
Your photograph should be clearly of you, nice and close up. A key technique is to make sure your face is well lit, so don’t have the window behind you. You want a nice head and shoulders shot that is well lit. Try to take the shot using natural sunlight, you will probably look better. If you take the picture indoors, do so near a window so the window provides the light on you. You want the camera to be between you and the window. To prevent shake, use a tripod, these are really low cost accessories, or just take several shots, preferably smiling to make a good first impression.
Twitter.com/log in/Settings/Account
You also need a bio. Your bio will be 160 characters long, it needs to include key words that describe your interest – and importantly relate to the name of the account.
Try to make it entertaining if you can. As always, there is no need to be a joker, but a light heart goes a long way.
Twitter.com/log in/Settings/Account
Third is your web link. Link to your the home page of your site or through to a myspace page or relevant blog page.
Twitter.com/log in/Settings/Design
You should also consider the back ground image. Either choose one that is not standard, so it looks at least like you have thought about it, or, preferably load up your own design. Or you can go to mytweetspace.com and they will create a profile image for you for free – or you can commission them to produce something personal to you.
There are two important items to consider for your back ground image. The first would be add a much larger picture of yourself or your product and the other is an information box.
Whether you choose a personal image or a product shot, it is preferable to choose an image with you in it. You should be fairly close up with a simple background, ideally head and shoulders. Everything else could so easily be a distraction from you and you are the main event to everything else.
Your information box would at the left of the page, about 160px wide and about 500px deep. It should contain a welcome message, a summary of what you are about (you can use more than 160 characters here) and a few links. Now the links are not clickable, so they need to be short. Some people make them look like links, we think this can produce some disappointment. This is the time to visit http://bit.ly and create a user account – it is free.
http://bit.ly is a key component in the twitter business jigsaw. We will come back to how you can use bit.ly again and again. the key thing is that it shortens urls and it tracks the number of clicks. So if you want to include a link to your Linkedin Profile – which is typically a lot of characters, then you can shorten it using bit.ly and bit.ly will also tell you how many people have entered the url. This way you can measure how many clicks this has generated for you!
Compare this url:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3223628&locale=en_US&trk=tab_pro
Twitter.com/log in/Settings/Notices
Finally unless you love getting loads of emails in your in box, visit the notices tab and turn all the notices off! You can glance at your DMs 10 at a time online – just remember to delete them, otherwise they really back up!
There is one more thing. If you have lots and lots of followers, and in particular if you follow our advice or employ us to build followers for you. You will find that you will receive 100s of DMs per day from all the people that follow you, you will want a better system. One such system you could use, and there are others is Tweetdeck. TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening. It connects you with your contacts across Twitter and Facebook. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date.
How to Twitter: How to Tweet – by video
To make life even easier for you I have prepared a video for you that you can watch on line. As you see me open an account, you will hear me talk through the process the variables and all the additional information that could be useful, that we have not written out here.
You will find a few additional ideas about setting up your account, you will see how I import an additional list from my email accounts. I show you how to upload a picture, set your email notices, and set up the time, link to your website and you can watch me insert my bio. Then I show you how to find people to follow and who knows some might follow me back!
That’s it for now
We hope you have found this edition interesting, the next part will be in your in-box shortly, thanks for reading. The best thing you can do now is to take action – go ahead – and follow us… @weboptimiser
Read on to discover how to build Raving Twitter Accounts
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