You’ve probably seen Twitter profiles from users who have a custom Twitter background. A custom Twitter background is a background image that has some information about them, maybe a photo, information about their website, etc…

Realizing that their brand can be extended not only through the content they author, but also through the way their profile looks on services like Twitter, they had custom background images created:

• http://twitter.com/SPOONFoundation
• http://twitter.com/taxresolution
• http://twitter.com/sweetbeemagic
• http://twitter.com/cooltweets
• http://twitter.com/ijustine

This is a relatively small investment for brand synergy, and helps people already familiar with your brand know they’ve found the right person on Twitter to follow. Remember that people aren’t usually reading your Twitter feed on your Profile page, they’re reading it on their Twitter Home page, or another Twitter application (like Tweetie). So, we’re really just talking about first impressions – like when someone clicks through a reference to you in another tweet, or clicks through to your Twitter profile page from a website – people will make the decision about whether to follow your feed very quickly. Their decisions will be based on whether the content looks interesting/valuable – don’t forget that part of that perception is based on the way your profile looks!

Some things to keep in mind when creating a custom Twitter background:

• Your background image will be aligned with the top-left of people’s browser windows – which we all know range from low to high resolutions. To prevent overlap with your Twitter feed, you want to optimize your design to work for the most popular resolution for most Twitter users, which is 1280px wide or more.
• You can choose for your background image to tile across the page, or just be a single image. In most cases, unless you’re using a repeating pattern with no information on it, you’ll want a single image. This means you want to pay special attention to the right and bottom boundaries of the image – making sure they gracefully integrate with the overall background color.
• Like with any web page, you want your background image to load as quickly as possible, so keep the filesize as small as possible.
• Remember – it’s just an image – your links & contact info won’t be active, just informative!

Contact me if you’re interested in having a custom Twitter background created for your profile!

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