Designing a Twitter profile seems really really easy, upload a picture as your profile image, a background image, set your colour for links and bobs your uncle it is done. But alas, that was a story from the same place Cinderella comes from, creating perfected branded Twitter profiles really needs a Graphic Designer familiar with digital design and marketing, preferably social media marketing. In this blog post I will discuss what you need to consider when designing a Twitter Profile to perfection and why it is more important than you think.
1. Designing a Twitter Profile with exact Twitter Profile Measurements
The exact measurements of the profile is really important, to the width of the timeline, to the width of the sidebar, to the header size and the profile picture. All these elements have an effect on designing your Twitter profile layout (This my Twitter Account). You then need to consider are you going to left align the background image, centre it or right align it. Once you have considered the layout of the design next you need to keep in mind that everyone will be viewing Twitter on different platforms.
2. Screen resolutions vary
Twitter is available to view on many different size screens from a small smart phone screen upwards to a very large Apple Desktop PC. Twitter is a responsive platform meaning that you need to consider how your background is going to look on screens with different resolutions. If you look at the above image you can see that the company has not considered that everyone will view their profile at larger screen sizes and forgot to set the default background colour as white to help fade in the image to its background. This is easy to change but important to get it right otherwise you will begin to look cheap and unprofessional.
3. Branding
So you have considered what to include in your layout when designing a Twitter profile and remembered that users will be viewing your profile with different size screens, next you need to consider your businesses brand.
Branding is really important and if you are not consistent with your business message your audience will become confused if your identity looks different on Twitter so try to keep it looking similar to your website, collateral and overall brand. If you have one ( and professional brand designers should provide you with one ) use your style guide and adhere to it as close as possible.
4. Communicate product or service when designing a Twitter Profile
Next you will want to take the opportunity to advertise the product or service you are selling. Consider the images you are using as your background and header and do they put across the right marketing message? Does it communicate a story and/or have a call to action such as ‘download our free ebook’ or ‘sign up to our newsletter to find out when our new product is released’ etc. Although your users won’t always see your main profile background it is a marketing opportunity you should exploit and if someone should visit your Twitter Profile it should communicate something appropriate.
5.Social Media Consistency
Do you have social media channels already? Make sure that they are consistent throughout. Another words, make sure they all look the same from the Twitter account, to Google+, to Facebook, they all need to have the same style. In this image above can you tell instantly that this account is connected to the Twitter account previously mentioned? Nope, I don’t think so either, to rectify their problem they simply need to use their logo and possibly more white in their cover photo design. They are also missing a marketing opportunity to communicate something with text not just pictures.
6. Contact details
Lastly, but not least, I think it is quite vital to place your contact details on the Twitter background. Consider putting your business telephone number, address and other urls that maybe point to your website, social media channels and anything else that you think is relevant.
All things considered you can’t be good at absolutely everything and although Twitter do make it fairly straightforward to create your own Twitter profile sometimes getting a professional designer to create your imagery is better so that you can focus on the important parts of running your business efficiently whilst a designer develops your profiles in the background. If you need help with your social media profile designs I can help you with it, simply contact me using the contact page here, alternatively if you are a fellow designer is there any other points you consider when creating social media profiles?
