1. Add value, either through links to your, or to others content. Don't focus on self promotion exclusively.
2. Build your brand and tribe (followers). You build followers by adhering to Rule #1 :) And the goal of building your tribe is to cultivate advocates for your business or directly create customers.
Part of building your brand is creating a look and feel for yourself on Twitter. An easy way to stand out from the masses of predesigned backgrounds is to create your own background in Photoshop.
This is my current background. You can see that the main Twitter area is in the middle of the screen, and it doesn't move (ie you need to have your content built around it).
This usually means you set up content to the left in a column format as I did here. You can also have the entire background be photos, but remember that they will be covered up by the central Twitter posting area and the location of this area will vary based on the users screen size. I have a 1920 pixel wide monitor, so the central Twitter area leaves some space with my column on the left. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution for a description of the most common monitor sizes.
It sounds confusing, but here are some general guidelines to start out.
How to:
1. Create a canvas by going to File/New. Set your width to 1920 and height to 1280 pixels. This will accomodate up to most widescreen monitors. Set your resolution to 72 pixels/inch, color mode to RGB color : 8 bit and background contents to your desired color.
This is the canvas that you build off of. You are only limited by the size of the final file (800K) as set by Twitter. You must save as jpg, png or gif and there are not hotlinks or animations allowed at present.
2. Next set up your guides: Right: If you build a left-hand column, which many do, make sure that it’s small enough not to be covered up by the central Twitter content – many designers suggest smaller than 235pixels. Left: Use 20 px from the left to give yourself some padding and 14 pixels from the top will line up your graphic with the top of the twitter logo.
3. Add your text and pics as layers
How to upload to your Twitter page:
a. save your PS document as a jpg, gif or png
b. On the top of the twitter page you will see a menu bar, click on “settings”
c. now this brings up the account page, there are a number of tabs, click on the design tab
d. option at bottom of page is, change background image, click on this
e. click the browse bar and locate the file you saved to your computer and highlight it
f. click save changes button at bottom of page and it should upload automatically
Enjoy!
