Twitter 101: Part 3
By Kelley Rao
If by chance you don’t think Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites are influencing the future of online communication, think again.
Consider the fact that the U.S. government recently requested that Twitter postpone scheduled maintenance so that the people of Iran could use this medium to share information about the protest situation. Now, there are conflicting stories as to the extent in which the State Department was actually involved and a White House official cited “this wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff.”
No matter how this came to fruition, the fact that people rely so heavily on this and other social networking sites to disseminate real-time information cannot be dismissed. So now that you are a Twitter aficionado, let’s cover just a few more topics before we take off your Twitter safety wheels and set you free.
Shortening URL Services
Social networking is all about sharing information and many times this includes referencing a page on the Internet. Some of these URLs can be very long and if you try to include one in your Tweet, you’ll be left with little room to explain what the link is about. Consider the following URL:
That’s a link to the article we wrote last month. Yikes! It’s 127 characters long. That leaves me with just 13 characters to “tell my story.”
Enter a URL shortening service. No doubt you’ve heard of the likes of TinyURL.com, where you copy a long, unwieldy URL like the one above, paste it into a field on their site and hit enter. Voila! Your 127 character URL has been converted to just 25 characters (http://tinyurl.com/nx92u6), leaving plenty of room for you to wax poetic. Some Twitter applications, such as Twhirl, have built-in shortening URL services.
However, I’m all about branding our company name wherever and whenever I can, so I use my own personal shortening URL service, to wit: http://www.web-eze.com/91e696. It too is 25 characters but also prominently displays my company name. If you’d like your own shortening service, check out http://code.google.com/p/phurl/. You’ll need your webmaster to install this for you (unless you’re geeky like me) and I recommend you password protect it so that it doesn’t get abused.
Customizing Your Twitter Home Page
When you first signed up for Twitter, you may have noticed your page design was pretty blah! But soon you were clicking about on the Settings Tab and found you could change your page design considerably. From a variety of background images to the colors of your fonts and side bars, with a little effort your Twitter page can go from blah to bling!
But, for some people (like me), it’s just not enough to change a color here and there. No, we want our very own custom Twitter page. If you have some basic design skills (and the software to support them), you too can create your very own Twitter page with the magic of a background image.
There are basically 4 different types of background images you can use (the acceptable formats are GIF, JPG and PNG and maximum file size is 800KB): Extended Profile, Big Image, Fade to Color and Repeating. Combinations of these images are common, too. For example, Extended Profile with a Fade to Color. That way, if the user has a very large monitor, they will see a smooth transition from your design to a solid color.
When determining what size your image will be, you’ll need to take into consideration the average user’s display preferences. A common size to shoot for is 1280px (width). Should a user have a smaller display, ie. 800px, they won’t get to see your Expanded Profile as it will be obscured beneath the Twitter interface where your Tweets appear. Keep in mind, too, that the Twitter logo appears on top of every design, so plan accordingly. There are plenty of resources on line that go into the pixel specific placement of your logo and other information. Here are two that should be helpful:
- http://www.web-eze.com/d3147a (written tutorial)
- http://www.web-eze.com/52b7cf (video tutorial using Illustrator)
That wraps up this 3 part series on Twitter Basics. I hope you’ve found it useful and informative. Tweet loudly and proudly my friends.
About the Author:
Kelley Rao is the President of Webeze, a website development and Internet marketing firm. In business since 1999, Webeze creates professional websites for small to medium-size companies that are interested in an effective online presentation. Emphasizing ease of use and focusing on the end-user experience, Webeze strives to not only build websites that attract high quality, targeted traffic, but also convert that traffic into clients.
