After branding your YouTube channel and Facebook page, branding your “Twitter backgrounds” comes next.  

There are two considerations. The first is logistically “how to” add a Twitter background, and I’ll provide the step-by-step instructions for adding Twitter backgrounds below.  The other consideration is adding a background that supports your branding message and “works” within a wide variety of monitor resolutions. 

But first thing’s first…

10 Steps to Adding a Twitter Background

 

1. Go to twitter.com and sign-in to your account if you’re not already signed in. You do this along the upper-right hand corner.

2. Once you are signed-in, you will see your menu choices along the top and these include: Home, Profile, Messages, Who to Follow.  You will also see a Drop Down choice next to your Twitter name along the upper-right hand corner. Click on that drop down arrow and choose “Settings.”

3. You now get a sub-menu of choices under the “Settings” section, including: Account, Password, Mobile, Notices, Profile, Design, Connections.  Click on “Design.”

4. At this point, your computer may (or may not) ask you whether you want to only view the “secure” elements of this page.  If it asks you that, click “No.”

5. You will see a collection of  “themes” you can select from.  Scroll lower and below the thumbnail choices representing your theme choices are two links: Change background image and Change design colors.  Click “Change background image.”

6. You will see a “Browse” button to the right of an empty box. This is how you select the graphic from your computer. If you already have your graphic, click the “Browse” button to upload it now and then skip to Step 10.

7. If you don’t have a graphic you will need to create one.  Depending upon your monitor’s resolution, it may appear that you have a “lot” of space for your background graphic. Or, it may appear that you have almost no space at all.  The “lower” your resolution, the less space you will have between the edges of the “Twitter table” and the edge of the monitor.   The graphic you use should be optimal for the maximum number of monitor resolutions (which, as I stated in a recent post, is 1024 x 768 according to Wikipedia).

8. Depending upon the graphic you upload, you may need to “color match” your Twitter background with the background color settings.

9. Save your image to your computer and then use the “Browse” button on your Twitter settings page referred to above to upload your image.

10. Once you have selected your image thumbnail by clicking on it, click on the “Save Changes” button and your graphic will be added to your Twitter page’s background.

In the case of Outskirts Press, we continued the branded background that we added to our YouTube Channel, and (to a much lesser extent) to the branding efforts we made to our Facebook page.  If you’re going to go through the efforts of customizing each of these social channels, they should demonstrate brand cohesion, right?

This background isn’t as ideal as the one for YouTube since it lacks the horizontal “banner” across the top of the content table that includes our graphic treatment company name and positioning statement tagline.  

And, in light of the monitor resolution considerations introduced above, we cannot add our logo and our “write.publish.market” tagline in any aesthetic way to the background itself, because it gets “cut off” in lower resolutions.  That’s the tricky part to be aware of!  Sure, the screen shot above (at approximately 1900 x 1200) appears to have plenty of room for a logo.  But at the recommended resolution for background design (1024 x 768) this Twitter page actually looks like this:

Not nearly as good, is it? We can’t prevent the woman from being “interrupted” by the Twitter table (short of removing her entirely), but at least the other two people simply disappear, as opposed to being cut off. 

This is the reason there aren’t any words on the background. They would get cut off, too.

In fact, Twitter makes uploading Twitter backgrounds harder than it needs to be by setting their background HTML to “fixed, left-justified.”  It would be easier to make Twitter backgrounds look “right” in multiple resolutions if it was “scrolling-centered” like the YouTube settings for custom backgrounds. 

But, oh well, you work with what they give you…

Now on to re-branding our blog, which is a topic for the near future. But first I’m going to talk a little more about our Facebook Anthology that we published for free for many of our Facebook fans, now that it’s for sale on Amazon… see you next time.