5 Benefits Of Customizing Your Twitter Background

We’ve written before about how to redesign your Twitter background for #NewTwitter’s dimensions, or change it without having to know any graphic design, but you’ve got to understand why you’d want to change it before making such a commitment.
Here are 5 benefits you’ll see after you change your Twitter background to a customized background for you and your brand.

Branding

The most obvious benefit to customizing your Twitter background is an improvement in your branding efforts.
You can create a background that uses the same colors as your company logo, includes your motto or slogan, and images that represent your brand.
It’s straightforward, but many Twitter users don’t fully realize the potential their background offers them for branding, whether personal or professional. You’ve got hundreds of pixels of free branding real estate ready to be customized to represent you – so get to it!

Consistency

A secondary, and related benefit to customizing your Twitter background is to improve the consistency of your image across all of your online properties.
If your Twitter background uses the same color scheme as the logo on your Facebook page and as your website and/or company blog, your audience will more readily identify you. They will have visual clues across all of your digital presences that sync up with one another.
Consistent branding is important in a world of 140-character sound bites that can quickly get lost in the noise, so if you have a recognizable brand across multiple platforms you will connect more quickly with your audience.

Identifying other web properties

Not only does a customized Twitter background offer you the ability to brand yourself consistently, but it also presents a unique opportunity to identify your other web properties outright.
The left side of your Twitter background is a blank slate, one which you can design to include your website address, Facebook profile, blog address and more.
You have between 41 and 108 pixels to reasonably work with (depending on what percentage of computer monitors you want to cater to), so think carefully about what you want to highlight.

Personalization

A custom Twitter background will also give your followers some insight into who you are.
Whether you are tweeting as an individual or as a brand, your background is the perfect place to show visitors what you’re all about. Everything from the colors and fonts you choose to the images and words displayed will say a little something about you and your brand.
This is a great opportunity to bring branding together with the social aspect of Twitter and maybe change your profile to reflect the causes you support, or show some pictures of your office “after hours”.

Highlights expertise

One of the more subtle benefits to customizing your Twitter background is that it will brand you as a bit of a Twitter expert.
As fiddling with Photoshop and creating your own, personalized background is not a novice task, those who visit your profile and see a background that is clearly tailored to your brand will likely come away with respect for you as a Twitter user.
Now, there is much more to being a great Twitter-er than just customizing your background – you’ve got to have an optimized profile, interesting tweets, and, most importantly, engage your audience – but it’s one of a handful of things you can do on Twitter to set yourself apart as someone who likely knows their @replies from their @mentions.

By Lauren Dugan