How to create a great background in Twitter?

It is not required but recommended to have a custom background in your Twitter profile which helps you in the following ways:-
1. It gives you a little bit of real estate to market yourself, your logo, photos, products etc.
2. You makes your followers feel at your home when they come to your profile. It makes you different from all others.
3. In the mind of the users, a custom background creates a credibility for you, if done properly. A good custom background is sure to increase your followers by at least 10%.

In this post I will show you in a step by step way about how to create a beautiful customized background in Twitter.

First you need to think of what you like to have as your background or rather what background would suit you the most. Do not copy other backgrounds because that does not make you unique but rather a copycat. Try to be original and think something creative. Suppose you are a doctor, you may like an operation theatre to be your background or may be a human anatomy. Say you are an electronic engineer, you may like a background with a lot of chipsets and circuits. If you are a software engineer, you may like to have lot of codes in the background. Now this is not the only line to think. If you like bikes or cars, you may put your favorite bike or car in the background. You may even put your photo in background or even a collage of your photos. You may put your best scenery or your best flowers in the background. Literally you may put anything which you like, anything related to you, anything which represents you or anything which you think others will like to see as your twitter background.

Once you are done deciding what you want to put in your background, just create your piece of art in Photoshop. Use your camera to get your original pics to use. If this is not possible search google images for the right one and try not to take any copyrighted images. Do understand that even if you take a copyrighted image, if you change the image to such an extend that it is not at all identical with the original image, this does not amount to a copyright violation.

Once you get the right image you gotto start your editing in photoshop keeping in mind the limitations of Twitter backgrounds. The following are the important factors you need to keep in mind while designing a background for twitter:-
1. The background image is not stretched or shrinked when the screen resolution changes, it gets cropped and a part of the image is not visible.
2. Twitter background is aligned to the left. So the real estate available towards the left is visible in most of the resolutions.
3. Twitter background may look perfect in a particular resolution and really wild in some other resolution. Therefore you need to refer to what percentage of users use which screen resolution. Below are the ways to find this out:-

1. Use your Google Analytics account to find out what most of your users are using. Always try that your background looks proper in at least 70-80% of your user's systems.
2. If you do not use Google Analytics or any such Analytical tool, you may find this data from other reliable sources and surveys. But I can assure you that this data will vary across surveys because people use the data from their own web analytics. Below is a chart of Screen Resolutions from a reliable source:-

Screen Resolutions
1     1024x768     24.44%
2     1280x800     18.94%
3     1280x1024     10.32%
4     1440x900     8.13%
5     1366x768     5.98%
6     1680x1050     5.14%
7     800x600     4.12%
8     1024x1024     2.47%
9     1152x864     2.18%
10     1920x1080     2.06%

The above chart shoes that almost 70% of the users are using the screen resolutions of the first 5 resolutions. So try to make sure that your background is visible properly in these 5 resolutions. If you ensure this, you will find that another 10-20% automatically falls in place.

So always try to optimize your twitter background for 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1366x768.

I am telling you that it is really difficult and almost impossible to make your background look almost the same in different resolutions. But atleast try to achieve the goal of making the main parts of your background visible.

If your background is a repitive one then you are relieved from all this tough job. But if you have specific/ particular images/ text in your background you will need to put some time into it.

Now you might be wondering after reading all this that how do I know whether my background is working or not without uploading!!! There are ways but I would suggest you to upload it into twitter directly using the following steps:-

Log in to your twitter account and go to the settings Tab. Go to the designs sub tab and select a design if you like. But your intention is to be different and therefore I would not recommend you to do so. Just scroll down below and click on change background image. Click the browse button and upload the file which you have designed keeping the above guidelines in mind. The file should be in jpg, png or GIF and smaller than 800KB.

Check whether it is comeing properly in your resolution or not. If it is, you are lucky. Go to your desktop, right click and change your resolution(method depends on operating systems). Check your twitter background with each of the above widely used reolutions and make the necessary changes. Once your background is working with almost all of the widely used resolutions, you are a successful Twitter Background Designer.

In my next posts I will post a live demo of creating a twitter background.