Twitter Background Images

July 7, 2009 in Twitter with 10 Comments

My Twitter Background Image

My Twitter Background Image

Whether you run a corporate or a personal Twitter account, your background image can say a lot about you.  I want to explain my often questioned background, and then give you some pointers for what makes an effective background for company tweets.

I get a surprising amount of direct messages from people telling me that they like my Twitter background image, and they want to know what it is.  Popular guesses include “steel mine” and anything to do with railroads.  Off-the-wall guesses include stuff from the Sci-Fi channel and “jet engine factory”.  The real answer is…a copper mine!  Not just any copper mine, it’s one that my great-grandfather was the manager of in Arizona.  I don’t know the exact date of the pic, but from what I understand (and this is understanding passed down a few generations, so who knows if it’s true or not) he actually took that picture.  It would make sense to me as I pulled it out of a photo album that included dozens of other pictures of him, other family members and more pics of Arizona copper mines than I ever thought possible. I may switch it over some day to my other favorite pic, my grandfather (as child…maybe 4 or 5) holding a human skull.  Huh.

Your Twitter background can make or break first impressions about your company, so choose it wisely.  If you run a corporate account that has several contributors, I think the best strategy is to list each contributor in the background image and denote their tweets with their initials, like “^MS” for Matt Singley.  Take a look at how Media Temple does it; great communication!  Another good example is Comcast Cares; although the account is handled exclusively by Frank, the background gives you a lot of other options for communication with Comcast, including their blog, other Comcasters on Twitter and Frank’s personal family blog!  Although your company doesn’t necessarily need to go to this level, it’s a nice touch.

If you are a person and not a company…try to dress up your background with something that is personal to you.  Renee Hamilton‘s page points out that she is a “talker, thinker, do gooder”, while “Scandalous” Jennifer Stavros has an amazing painting. It’s easy enough, when you are logged into Twitter go to Settings–>Design–>Change Background Image (the button at the bottom) and then upload a file from your computer. If you are handy with Photoshop, check out these Twitter background guidelines and make something spectacular!

So what about you…do you have an interesting and personal background on your Twitter page?  What’s the link and the story?

About Matt Singley: I run this joint. Always looking for feedback, and if there is something you want me to write about, just let me know! Thanks for stopping by.


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  • http://www.mineandthine.com Chris Dattilo

    Thanks for the helpful tips. I work for a nonprofit where we’ve been wrestling how to handle multiple people tweeting from the same account. Authenticity is important, so I like both Comcastcares and Mediatemple’s examples vs. a Hootsuite type solution (multiple people not identified tweeting for one account).

    Helpful link to the Photoshop tip as well. Thanks Matt!

  • http://www.richkirkpatrick.com Rich Kirkpatrick

    I have wallpaper from Rock Band, one of my favorite video games on Xbox that I get to play with my family. It lets people know I like music and yes…even video games, besides being a minister at a church.

    It gets a lot of fun responses so far. Maybe its time to change, though.

  • http://www.twitter.com/robinzaleski Robin Zaleski

    We’ve been using a simple background but with art that includes all our twitter names and all our conference logos and websites for sometime now. My issue with the way that Twitter set up the background is that it is meant for at least a 1280 x 768 screen resolution. Those of us stuck with corporate-issued 15″ 1024 x 768 laptops or monitors can’t see the right half of the column of art on the left side of the screen. All that great info on Comcast Cares, Media Temple, etc is lost on us. I wonder if we cold get Twitter to change the absolute positioning of the body of the page so that it hugged the right side of the screen instead of the center…

  • http://blog.otabi.com Steve Cerruti

    Robin,

    Yes, that is an issue and it makes it hard to design Twitter layout that works over multiple resolutions.

    Of course with Firefox a quick right-click and View Background Image will reveal the hidden secrets. IE 8 is not as convenient, but you can still save the background with a right click and view it by itself.

    The problem I see is all of that useful information tells me that Twitter needs to provide additional profile fields, or a single large HTML capable field. By having that information only available in the site design (i.e. background image) it is lost on users of other Twitter clients.

    Once the fields were available it might be possible to provide more site design capability to display that information as part of the design for Twitter.com users.

    Steve

  • http://www.customtwit.com Brian Hanson

    Low res users like 1024×768 can try a trick. Hold down control key and click the + or – keys with your browser open. This will adjust the browser resolution. This is not changing the computer resolution, only the browser. You can also use the lil magnifying glass located in the bottom right of most browsers. There you can also make adjustments. If you use FireFox you can get the add on “NoSquint” and the sky is the limit! Hope this helps all you corporate folk!

  • http://twitter.com/reneeAhamilton Renee Alexander Hamilton

    WOW-I was half way through your blog and thinking of tweeting you to see what you think of my background and then WOW you mentioned me. THANKS MATT! For the record, I put a lot of thought into my background, I wanted it to reflect that I am fun yet strong and of course point out the 3 things I am always doing: talking, thinking and (hopefully)doing good!

  • http://www.twitter.com/lisamurray LisaMurray

    I love this article. And I have wondered about your background image. And being from Arizona, I got a kick out of finding out what the picture is. A while ago, I just created a basic template. I’m not sure if it’s “me” but now that I’ve read this article, I will look around and seek to upgrade. The problem is that most people seem to be on Tweetdeck (or the like) so the backgrounds don’t show up. I don’t know, what are the percentages? How many people are accessing our Twitter pages with their web browser vs. Tweetdeck/etc.? Thanks again for the great article!

    - LisaMurray :-)

  • http://www.imagedesigns.com Matt Clark

    Good stuff! The left side is the “safezone” — just make sure you design for small resolutions and large. Too many times I see backgrounds that are cut off. The minimum would be 1024×768 and the max 1920×1200 :)

    You can check out our free backgrounds at http://www.tweetpages.com too :)

  • http://twitter.com/vnesdoly violet

    Good info – thank you. And I love the sepia copper mine pic!

    My twitter background is a pic from our holidays last year. It’s a scene from Savoury Island off the coast of B.C. I tweaked it till it showed just one image of moi on the left while the rest of the partial tiles are just bits of the scenery.

  • http://blogmoneymania.com blogmoneymania

    I LOVE that pic you have for your background -it looks like a silver plate photo. Gorgeous!