From Fledgling to Full-Blown Marketing

Beyond creating content that is relevant and engaging, the first impression that your Twitter page provides is lasting and more powerful than you might imagine. The initial step to coming across like the professional and reliable company that you are is to present yourself correctly. A few small changes can be made to your profile that could mean the difference between someone turning off or tuning in.

Profile Picture
Although your favourite picture of yourself might be the one of you and your mum at Crufts 2008, it's probably not saying the right thing about your accountancy company. Choose recent, choose relevant and choose reputable. Stick with a photo of just yourself so that people can intuitively identify who it is that they are connecting with.

Profile Text
Your profile text should be short and sweet. Briefly outline what it is that you do and where you are based. The fantastic thing about twitter is that pithiness is obligatory and you are forced to condense all jumbled-up-jargon down to its essence. Including contact information is a straight-forward way to appear honest and accountable. If you are reluctant to include a phone number, an email address will work wonders and creating a business domain is simple.

Background
The default background, used by millions, lacks originality, personality and most importantly exclusivity. By keeping the blue-and-white design, you cloud potential insight into your brand. Even personal Twitter account holders ditch the default to upload something that says anything about who they are. If hiring a graphic designer is out of reach, as it is for many, a large good quality picture that is relevant to your company -perhaps the team, the office or a product - can work well. Otherwise, block colour images are clean and simple, and placing a logo on the top left hand side of the background means that it will be visible at all times when someone is browsing your page.

Names
Your user name (used for mentions and retweets) and profile name (displayed on your page) are two different things but should be kept as similar as possible. When searching eople are most likely to type in the name that you display on your profile and if your username doesn’t match that they are also likely to give up when the search turns into a struggle. As well as this, keep it short; Tweets can only contain 140 precious characters and the fewer that someone has to sacrifice when mentioning you the better. You want to make it simple and convenient for your followers to engage with you.