Twitter Backgrounds. Know how to set custom background.

Mar 19

I have a twitter account since April 2009. I started using it from April 2010. I didn’t used it for one year because I unable to understand twitter advantages. But now I understood what advantages we can have with a twitter account and how it can help us in our business too.

Advantages of Twitter and Business Advantages of Twitter:

Twitter is easy to use. In registration, it will only take you less than a minute to join.
Twitter is truly a social networking or social media.
There are over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API. Applications come in many varieties, including desktop applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic, or EchoFon, websites such as TweetMeme, fflick, or Topsy, or mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Blackberry, or Foursquare.
Know the Breaking news first though twitter , whether it is terrorist attacks on Mumbai or Michael Jackson’s passage. News breaks in twitter only.
Promote Your Blog and Website through twitter by posting updates.
Get lot of followers for being active in twitter and drive huge traffic to your blog and website.
Create an online identity for your brand through twitter.
Earn money using sponsored tweets in Twitter.
Suggest tips to techmeme , other bloggers and gets famous for that online.
Keeps you engage with your customers on twitter through updates. You can post updates on what you are working on
Share you personal life like latest vacation photo links, new night club you visited etc

Above I tried to provide small list of advantages. Practically there are many more advantages and it totally depends on how you use your twitter account. You can use your twitter account just for fun, promote your business, promote your website or blog and to promote yourself.

I’m now using twitter to promote my business, myself and promote my latest work.

Twitter Backgrounds:

This is very interesting part of twitter. You can customize the background image of you twitter page and also color scheme of the page. Though you cannot customize the color of the left panel of the page which is always white.

I learned about this feature few days back and designed my own twitter background. Check it Out Yourself.

Now I’m using this background feature to my advantage:

I designed the background in such a way that I can list the services I provide. I kept my Contact Information and Services of the left side and on the right side I place some thumbnails of my best designs. I kept the color scheme same as my website so that they compliment each other, this helps in branding.

Things you should know about Twitter Backgrounds:

CSS wise background is always aligned to Left Top. You cannot change this background position settings.
Text in you background do not get indexed by search engines. So don’t create a background based on SEO concept. For SEO place keywords in your profile and also place the link of your website in twitter profile.
Background are better viewable in wide screen monitors. In narrow screen monitors the background hides behind the main twitter area.
Always place all your important textual information on the left side of background as it most likely to be visible. Though this not a strict rule to place textual information on the left side, it is my experience and suggestions. You can make you own concept

How set your custom background image from twitter interface:

Login to your twitter account.
Then visit the setting page by clicking the setting link at the top right corner of the page.
Then click the design page
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Change background image”.
The click the “Browse” button and select the background from your computer. If have made a small image and what it fill the whole background by duplicating itself, then click “title background” checkbox.
Click “save changes” to view your image and setting and publish the background image.

Two change the color scheme click the “Change design colors” button on Design tab of Setting page. Twitter provide a nice color picker. It shows when you click on the color boxes. Each box has a title and those are very self explanatory. You can understand which colors is which part of your twitter page.

What is size of Twitter Content Area:

On Twitter current version the width of content area is 763px and it center aligned. So on a 1360 you get approximately 280px space on both sides through which your background will be visible. So plan you design and content accordingly. So remember the twitter background is always aligned to Top Left.

New Version of Twitter is very different:

The Left Panel width 540px and it is static. The background color white is not translucent.
The Right Panel is flexible. It has a minimum width of 381px approx and maximum width of 500px. The background color can be changed from design page and it is translucent.
So the total minimum width is 921px and maximum width is 1040px. So plan you design accordingly.
Point to remember background is still aligned to Top Left and content area is center aligned.

Let me know what you think about twitter and twitter background.