Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [18]
Customizing Your Profile
Your public page on Twitter, also known as your profile, is other Twitter users’ first impression of you, and it can make a big difference in whether they decide to follow you. Take a few minutes to dress it up a little! Making sure that it reflects you or your business makes all the difference when it comes to whether people stick around to see what you have to say.
After you sign up for Twitter, one of the first things you should do is personalize your profile. Make sure that you have
An avatar (a picture that shows up to the left of your tweets, representing you or your company)
A background image or background color for your home page
A bio that’s 160 characters or less
A link to anything else you want to share
Some of the best profile pages on Twitter are the ones that give you a look into that user’s personality. Someone who loves to ski might upload an image of his favorite mountain range as the profile background and pair it with an avatar that depicts him in ski goggles. You don’t have to bare your soul, but people on Twitter want to know something about you, and the public page is where they can first discover it.
After you log into Twitter, you can customize your profile at any time by clicking Settings in the top-right navigation bar.
Changing your avatar
Your avatar is displayed to the left of all your tweets, so it’s your official face on Twitter. Some Twitter users change their avatars almost daily to different photos of themselves, some users leave their avatars the same all the time, and still others change their avatars according to a specific occasion — holiday-themed photos for Christmas or Halloween, for example. Your avatar is your face, some other picture, or the default oogily eyes emoticon: o_O. It’s your choice.
People don’t like following back if your avatar is just the default. Show your smiling face and set others at ease!
To change your avatar, follow these steps:
1. Sign in to Twitter and click Settings in the top-right menu bar.
The Settings page opens.
2. Click the Picture tab (see Figure 2-6).
Figure 2-6: Smile for your Twitter avatar photo, instead of using the default oogily eyes.
3. Click the Browse button and navigate to the picture that you want to upload.
Currently, Twitter supports the .jpg, .gif, and .png file formats.
4. Click the Save button.
Your picture is uploaded to Twitter.
The size of your profile image is restricted to 700 kilobytes (which is a rather large image), and Twitter crops it automatically into a square for your public profile. Choose an image that’s square or close to square, or make sure that the part of the image you want featured in your avatar’s thumbnail version is in the center of the image.
Try to find a picture that’s at least 73 x 73 pixels. Otherwise, Twitter stretches the picture out, causing some distortion.
If you upload a photo and it doesn’t look quite right, don’t panic! Just find a new picture (or adjust the original file) and try uploading it again. You can upload a new picture at any time.
Changing your background
In addition to changing your avatar, you can change the background of your profile page from the default blue to another color. You can even upload an image of your choice (or do both!). You can tile an image (make it repeat, like tiles on a floor), make an image large enough to cover the entire background, or choose a smaller image that doesn’t cover the entire background (and leaves a solid color behind it).
To change your background by using Twitter’s tools, follow these steps:
1. Sign in to Twitter and click Settings in the top-right menu bar.
The Settings page opens.
2. Select the Design tab.
3. Select a pre-made background or use your own image or pattern.
The pre-made Twitter backgrounds appear in square thumbnail images inside the Design tab.
If you don’t want a standard Twitter look, but instead