How to Improve Your Twitter Profile
There are some very important aspects that need to be clear when you want to improve your Twitter profile. These points need to be observed, and their order isn’t the priority. Observing all points in whatever order you want to observe them, however, is.
- Your profile photo
- Your user name
- The text in your profile
- Location and date of birth
Let’s go through these one by one, so you can improve your Twitter profile.
Choose the Right User Name
You need to be mindful that a user name should be both unique, but also interesting. If you are a MLM salesman, MLM Sales would be a very bad choice of user name. It doesn’t tell anything about who is behind the profile. You can’t build trust if you are trying to be anonymous. However, Don Johnson – MLM Expert or Don Johnson – MLM Guru could be excellent choices.
You want to let people know what you’re working with, but without over-selling your idea.
No, you don’t want to use movie names. Dirty Harry isn’t your best choice for a user name, unless you were Clint Eastwood. Similarly, Fred Flintstone is a cartoon character, not a user name for a real living person. Be very mindful of this when you create that user name, because you won’t be able to change this later on.
Your Profile Photo
You want to use a photo that signals that you are a positive person. Smile to the audience. Similarly, don’t take a topless photo. Be decent. Wear a polo shirt, maybe even one with a logo, if you have one. It’s perfectly fine that your location is Sydney, Australia. The weather may be fine all year, but you want a photo on your profile that signals a professional mindset.
If you want to add something fun, you could choose your header photo, but I wouldn’t suggest overdoing it. A nice sunset or flowers. Maybe a fireplace – something cozy that signals you have good karma and enjoy quiet moments in your life, too.
As you can see, the visuals on your Twitter profile are important. You need the right balance of happy combined with serious and professional. Profile photo and header image will do a lot in establishing a good first impression for visitors to your Twitter profile. This is what separates men from boys. Professional people know the value of good first impressions.
The Text in Your Profile
This is the most important aspect of any profile on Twitter. Take a long and hard look at your life. You need to ask the right questions to analyze your way to the best text in your Twitter profile:
What are you trying to achieve?
What are your unique qualifications?
What can visitors get from following your profile?
Remember, that the link you can add to your profile should allow people who want to know more about you to get it over there. Don’t waste important characters on all of that. You should create a buzz around your profile, and that requires to make people curious about who you are.
Focus on the most important aspects. What is valuable to you? What do you have to offer?
Get out a sheet of paper. Write TWITTER PROFILE at the top, and do a brainstorm. Once you have twenty key words, strike five out. Try to combine what you have into one or two short sentences. Rewrite and repeat.
Once you are fully satisfied, keep your sheet of paper – and try taking a look at it from time to time. As you proceed on Twitter, you will find inspiration, and you will see new ways of saying things, and you might get even better ideas the third or fourth time around.
Be mindful that once you have a routine in doing this, you will be able to do this the first time around. But in the beginning, you need to do this just as you did when you made school assignments. Don’t jump over this step. You want to get that profile text just right for your audience so you can grow your list of followers.
On my Danish profile, the link goes to another site where I have an overview of activities in Danish. When people click this link, they come over to my e-book on why I chose to leave Facebook. I am not wasting any time telling about this in my profile.
As you may have guessed this text is the result of at least five or six revisions through the years as focused moved from what I was working with in 2008 when I created my Twitter profile.
Location and Date of Birth
This aspect is highly important. You must build credibility, and telling people where you live and when you were born are part of that picture. Don’t be shy. Whether you are 29 or 58 isn’t as important as appearing honest is. You want to present a complete person to the audience. Someone people want to follow.
Be mindful however that your profile and header photos should fit your location. It doesn’t snow all that much in Beverly Hills in California – and a photo from your trip to Thailand may not be the best header photo, unless you are in fact writing about liking travels in your Twitter profile text. Make sure everything fits the occasion and your profile.
In Conclusion
Can you remember the saying “A stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet”?
This should be your focus when creating, or improving, your Twitter profile. You want people to feel welcome to click that Follow-button. When you give them a good first impression you make it far easier for them to click that button. Be mindful you don’t get second chances at making good first impressions.
Best of luck to you. You now know exactly what you need to improve your own Twitter profile.
Important Update
This article was originally posted in October 2016. It has now been updated with something very important. Recently a lot of spam profiles are starting to target high traffic tweets. They like your tweets or follow you in the hope that they can get people to dating sites. They can be recognized by having only very few tweets – usually <30 – and a photo of a young girl, probably taken from the internet.
I warmly recommend you report and block these profiles. I know from updates from Twitter that they are looking into this, but it does take both time – and energy – to stop such robot profiles. It is highly important that we remove these profiles as they are destructive towards the sense of community that should characterize Twitter…