A customized Twitter profile background page lets you put vital information behind your Twitter stream so that people can know more about you and your business. You can see your Twitter profile page on your Twitter link http://twitter.com/yourtwitterhandle. A typical Twitter page looks like this:

Yes, I know, we don’t have a custom Twitter profile page, but we’ll soon have one.

There are two ways, in fact 3 ways you can customize your Twitter profile page background. The easiest among the 3 is using the Settings like at the top. Once you are in the settings section, you click Design, and there you’ll see a selection backgrounds that you can choose for your Twitter profile page background.

Just click an image and then save changes. You can also change the theme colors.

Another — the more prevalent — way of customizing your Twitter profile page background is by creating your own image. You can your favorite image editing tool to create your custom background. Just make sure it doesn’t get overlapped by the white space that shows your Twitter stream.

While creating a customer Twitter profile page background many people assume that everybody has the same screen size they have. If it matters to you that everybody should be able to view your profile you should take care it’s visible through even smaller screens. Just to make sure your customized Twitter profile page background looks good on most screen resolutions and sizes you can go to this Twitter background checker; enter your Twitter handle it the website tells you how your background fits into major screen sizes.

On the top left corner you should have your image along with your contact information like email (remember that email link won’t be clickable as it’s an image) and phone numbers. This is a good example (click the image for a fuller version):

Some people put lots of information on their Twitter profile backgrounds — it depends on you and your business.

The 3rd method involves using 3rd-party tools and utilities to create your custom Twitter profile page background. Twilk, for instance, creates a collage of your followers’ thumbnails and creates a background out of that. ClickableNow, as the name suggests, makes your custom background links clickable. For instance, if you have a link on your Twitter profile page background, people can click that link and go to your website. But a big drawback is that only those can click the links who have installed a browser add-on available on the ClickableNow website.

There are many other tools and utilities available on the Internet that can help you further customize your Twitter profile page background but the above-mentioned methods can surely get you going in the right direction.

Is social media marketing an integral part of your overall business marketing strategy? Then you need to make sure you avoid these 5 common social media marketing mistakes:

1. Not monitoring your social media marketing effort
2. Letting inexperienced persons handle your social media presence
3. Getting caught up in delays
4. Orchestrating false events, posts and responses
5. Considering that there is an end-date

Not monitoring your social media marketing effort

Or monitoring it half-heartedly. Your social media presence can be an effective marketing and business growth tool and therefore it requires different levels of monitoring. You need to monitor in terms of how much time is being spent or running and managing your social media marketing campaign, how many people respond and what overall effect it has on your business.

Letting inexperienced persons handle your social media marketing campaign

When it comes to dealing with people you need tact and experience. One wrong response and it can destroy your entire social media marketing campaign. One wrong response from a Nestle social media representative escalated into a full-fledged campaign against the company.

Being too slow

Things happen very fast on social media so if your social media effort is caught up in too much bureaucratic procedures by the time you post your response there will be thousands of messages and people will not even notice your response. Your feedback and response on social media has to be timely, and quick.

Planting stories and customers

Creating false social media personalities to create positive buzz for your company may backfire, although it may seem to work in the beginning. If the news come out your social media presence will be permanently marred — nobody will ever trust you. The news on the Internet spreads like wildfire, and people rarely forget.

Setting an end date for your social media marketing campaign

Social media marketing is an ongoing process and it has to last as long as your business lasts. Of course there are events then they must end, but as far as your presence on social media and your daily interaction with your customers and clients this must be a permanent process.

Read more on Business Week.

Twitter allows you just 140 characters to express your thoughts, including words, links, punctuations and spaces, which, in most of the cases, is long enough. But what if you want to post longer tweets? Although it’s more fun, and convenient to limit yourself within 140 characters, some ideas do need more than 140 characters.

If you regularly want to post longer than 140 character tweets then may you should use some other system, but occasionally, you can try out these methods to post longer tweets:

Use TweetShrink feature in TweetDeck

In case you are using TweetDeck, which is a desktop Twitter client it has a TweetShrink feature: after entering your message you click this button and it shrinks your message so that “You can easily shrink this message with this” immediately becomes “U cn easily shrnk ths msg w/ ths”.

Use shorter forms and abbreviations

It’s like this text message fad where “you” becomes “u”, “we” becomes “v” and “for” becomes “4″ and so on.

Create a small blog post and then link to it from Twitter

You can accompany the link with a shorter and succinct description of what you’re communicating so that your followers have an idea of what to see once they click the link. If you don’t have blog you can use a service like Posterous.

Use tweet-shortening services

• FireFox plugin Twitzer. This plugin is created by the people who made ShortText, a utility that lets you create short streams of text and then use the link anywhere you feel like, without having to have a website or a blog. You can install Twitzer here. Once you have installed the plugin, you go to your Twitter home page, enter your tweet without bothering how many characters you are typing. Once you have had your fill, right-click anywhere on the text and in the ensuing menu select “Twitzer text”.
  
  It shortens the text and the remaining can be accessed by clicking an automatically-generated link.
• Twitlonger. This tool does the same thing as above. Log into it using your usual Twitter login, create the epic message and it posts a link to your bigger message.
• JumboTweet. OK, we don’t like posting repetitive information as it becomes kind of boring, but this link too does the same thing.

Just like any other networking tool you can use Twitter too to grow your business [read how to grow your business with Linkedin]. It is a great place to follow conversations, study trends and participate in global talks. It helps you study what your prospective customers and clients are talking about and then make changes in your business accordingly. Businesses that change according to your customer and client feedback are the ones that grow faster.

It’s all about creating a vibrant presence [read how to get attention on Twitter] where people listen to you and you listen to them and there is a two-way communication. Your presence can be in terms of your brand or as a person — as a person works better because people have someone to directly talk to instead of the feeling-less company name.

Here’s how you can

Use Twitter to grow your business

• Create a presence. You should have a decent account on Twitter with a name people can associate with.
• Don’t start following people right left and center. Creating a meaningful presence on Twitter takes time. Don’t follow thousands of people just so that they follow you back. This works for some but you’re not trying to get tons of followers here, you need people who really listen to you and are interested in what you have to say.
• Use hashtags and trends. To see what people are saying about your business or products and services your business offers. This will give you a chance to approach them and offer a solution if they have a problem. In TweetDeck and Hootsuite you can create columns for different search terms so that all the updates related to your search terms appear in those columns in real time.
• Use Twitter tools. It’s not very productive to use the default Twitter interface because it doesn’t offer you many features. Instead, you should try out the tools mentioned above — TweetDeck and Hootsuite — to enhance your Twitter experience as they offer you many inbuilt features. With Hootsuite you can even schedule your tweets to appear after a couple of days of posting.
• Create an informative profile page. A profile page is the background for your link http://twitter.com/username. People visit this link in order see who you are before they follow you and this is good place to showcase important information about you or your business. It’s simply a background image with your picture, URLs and other details. Due to a particular format of the default Twitter profile page you’ll need to be careful about how you design your Twitter profile page. Here are a few examples of some great Twitter profile page backgrounds http://www.2expertsdesign.com/design-showcase/50-beautifully-designed-left-bar-in-twitter-profile-backgrounds
• Actively participate in conversations. When you converse with people on one-one basis they remember you better and respond to your tweets more eagerly. This is how you eventually establish long-lasting relationships.
• Use Twitter lists. After a while it becomes difficult to manage tweets of all the people you’re following. You end up missing important tweets because so many people are posting at the same time. You can create Twitter lists to organize people you’re following so that you don’t miss important tweets. You can keep your lists either public or private.
• Be consistent. You need to maintain your visibility on Twitter simply because there are too many people there competing for attention. Remain offline for a week and people begin to forget you. You need to be in front of them — if not always — at least daily, for a certain amount of time.
• Maintain quality. You are known by the tweets you post. Be regularly visible doesn’t mean posting anything you come across. Whether it belongs to your own website/blog or to some other source, be selective about what you post. Is it valuable to your followers? Are they going to benefit from it?
• Show interest in other things too. If you just talk about your business you are not going to make much impact. Be a part of the society because eventually every business is a part of the society. Have a say in politics or social affairs? Don’t hold yourself back.
• Strike a balance. For a persistent Twitter presence you’ll need to strike a balance because after a while it’s difficult to draw a line whether you are trying to grow your business or simply idling away your time.
• Continuously monitor your presence. If you want to grow your business with Twitter then you should continuously analyze your activities and performance. After all you are putting your resources that you could have used somewhere else. If you are spending your own time on Twitter then keep a tab on how much you are spending and how it is affecting your business performance.

Like any other business networking exercise creating a presence on Twitter that helps you grow your business takes time, effort, and in many cases, money. You’ll need to have a solid strategy.

Here are some more good links on how to grow your business with Twitter:

• 62 ways to use Twitter for business
• How to use Twitter to grow your business
• 50 ideas on using Twitter for business

Have you just started using Ubuntu and wondering where all your desktop Twitter applications are gone? Worry not. All the desktop clients that were available in Windows can be used in Ubuntu too. How? It’s because almost all the major desktop Twitter applications run on Adobe AIR.

Adobe AIR allows application developers to develop platform independent applications rapidly. So all you need is install Adobe AIR in Ubuntu from this link [read how to execute a .bin file in Ubuntu] and then install one of your favorite Twitter desktop applications. Here’s a list of desktop Twitter applications that you can easily use in Ubuntu once you’ve installed Adobe AIR.

The latest version of Ubuntu – 10.04 — also comes with its own social media application called Gwibber but it’s just a beginner’s application.

Image Source: WikiMedia

Are you a football crazy fan and is it a matter of life and death to know the latest on the FIFA World Cup 2010? Twitter might be the answer for you. For a couple of years Twitter has been a great source of updates on major world events, whether they’re natural disasters, celebrity death, socio-political uprisings or international supporting events.

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while (it’s OK if you’ve just started) it’s quite easy for you to follow what all is going on in the FIFI World Cup 2010. Here are a few things that might help:

Follow ardent FIFA World Cup fans and sports news agencies

If you follow the right people they might be the best source of football related information. They’re constantly posting information from their own sources and from other sources. You can also try to find sports journalists that are very active on Twitter and who constantly posting FIFA World Cup 2010 updates. Some Twitter users that you may like to follow are:

• WCUP2010
• FIFAWorldCupTM
• 2010 FIFA World Cup
• SA2010 World Cup
• TheFA.com
• Sports Illustrated Soccer
• World Cup Scores

Follow Twitter lists dedicated to FIFA World Cup 2010

People create Twitter lists so that they can organize their streams into various sections. So for a while if you want to follow conversations only related to the FIFA World Cup you can create a list specific to this topic, or you can follow lists created by other Twitter users interested in the ongoing soccer updates. There is a comprehensive compilation of Twitter lists on the football world cup on this Mashable link.

Use hashtags and trends

You can also use the various Twitter search tools to search for hashtags associated with the FIFA World Cup 2010. Hashtags like “Fifa World Cup”, #worldcup, Vuvuzela, A-Team, etc.

If you are using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite you can even create separate columns using search terms like “worldcup” or “fifa” and receive the streams continuously.

The different Twitter search tools that you can use to search for the FIFA World Cup topic are:

• search.twitter.com
• Twazzup
• Flaptor
• FeelTipTop

Image Source: @boetter

Although on this page I’m not trying to encourage you to delete your Facebook or any other social media account, but in case you decide to, you should be able to delete it permanently without leaving a trace. There are many who think they have deleted their Facebook account just to realize later on that their account is still activate.

It seems the guys at Facebook — due to whatever reason — don’t want to hand the process of permanently deleting an account over to their users. The reason might be that it takes up lots of time to create your social media presence — years in many cases — and if someone is able to just delete your account like any bit of random information it can be disastrous.

In case you no longer want to use your Facebook account you can:

• Deactivate your Facebook account
• Delete your Facebook account permanently

Deactivate your Facebook account

Sometimes you don’t want to use your account for while and also don’t want to be visible on Facebook. You can easily deactivate your account by going to Account -> Account Settings. There under the Settings tab you’ll find an option to deactivate your account. All your data — photos, videos, comments and postings — remain there, and are immediately available the moment you reactivate your account.

Delete your Facebook account permanently

There is no direct link that you can click and delete your Facebook account permanently but you can place a delete request using this link. Your account is not deleted immediately and your delete request is cancelled if you login after placing the request or use Facebook in some manner from the same computer from where you placed the request, so make sure you remain away from Facebook after you have placed a request for permanent account deletion.

Aside for being a great social networking app Twitter can also be a great business building tool provided you know how to use it. Just like any other social trend, you need to monitor what’s happening, where it’s happening, who all are involved, and how you can participate.

By merely using the default Twitter web-based interface or by using one of the Twitter clients [read about 7 Twitter applications and clients you can use from your desktop] you cannot hope to achieve much. When it comes to business you really need to know your audience and create an effective, non-intrusive strategy. You can simply increase traffic to your website with Twitter and for that you have to make people pay attention to you, but it’s a lot more than that.

You constantly need to engage in meaningful conversations and you really need to reach out to your target audience. For that you need the appropriate Twitter tools, whether for your desktop or for your mobile device. As mentioned above, you cannot achieve much using a single, or even a couple of Twitter applications to leverage its potential for your business. Social Media Examiner reviews a website that has a repository of more than 3,000 Twitter applications and tools.

Would you like to create multiple Twitter accounts and still use the same email ID with all of them. Currently Twitter does not allow that. Whenever you want to create a new Twitter account you need to use a new email account.

But using Gmail you can create multiple Twitter accounts using the same email ID? There is a snag in Gmail that you can take advantage of…although it might not work in future, but by that time you will have already created your accounts. Gmail doesn’t differentiate between your.name@gmail.com and yourname@gmail.com. So if you have created your Gmail ID as your.name@gmail.com or yourname@gmail.com, whether you send an email to the former or latter, it goes to the same email ID.

Other services, on the other hand, take them as two different email IDs. So in Twitter you can create two accounts by using your.name@gmail.com and yourname@gmail.com. Is that it? No, you can create more accounts by using you.rname@gmail.com, yourn.ame@gmail.com etc. and they’ll all go to the same email ID and you can create multiple Twitter accounts using it.

Tip: labnol

Image Source aye_shamus

Social media and social networking is all about getting people to pay enough attention to you. But that’s easier said than done. With millions of users throwing in millions of messages everyday, getting attention on social media is not easy, unless of course you are a celebrity and already enjoy fame.

Having said that, you can make people pay attention to you on social media with persistence and strategy. Here are a few things you can do:

• Don’t get swayed by the numbers. Do you often wonder how some people and organizations lap up 100s of 1000s of fans and followers over Facebook and Twitter? No need to fret over the numbers. If you have 500 fans and followers and 300 of them pay attention to you, it’s much better than having 5000 fans and followers and hardly anybody caring to read your messages or interact with you. It doesn’t matter how many people follow you, what matter is, how many pay attention to you on social media.
• Accept that it takes time. As every good thing is life, your social media presence takes time and effort to blossom into something that gets you attention. Don’t go for shortcuts in order to get more fans and followers. Slow and steady actually wins the race here on social media.
• Sustain quality. People on social media are constantly looking for good stuff: something that entertains them, informs them, updates them, and maybe solves their problems. Provide them quality information; don’t promote just anything you can come up with just to be visible. Be known as the ones who’s a good source, not a nonsense.
• Be persistent. Since so many people are engaged in social media, it’s not easy to remember everybody. To a particular set of people, be visible consistently. Maintain a schedule and stick to that. If you plan to post 5 links everyday, try to stick to that number. And no, you don’t have to post 50 links everyday.
• Follow conversations. If you want people to pay attention to you, then you should also pay attention to them, it is as simple as that. Take genuine interest in what they’re talking about and offer your 2 cents wherever they are appropriate. It’s conversations that eventually make you familiar with your fans and followers.
• Engage people. Don’t ask them questions that only benefit you (they hardly reply unless you are very well-known), ask questions that intrigue them, fascinate them, and make them pay attention to you.
• Help whenever you can. This is the best way of getting attention. People often ask questions on various social media websites. Use the search tools to find out what sort of questions are being asked. But remember to answer only if you really know the answer and your answer can help that person. If your answer works for that person, who or she will remember you for a long time and pay close attention to your updates.
• Publish quality content on your blog or website. This is also an excellent way of making people pay attention to you. Share your knowledge and wisdom on your blog regularly and become an authority figure. Be known in your field. This way people go to extra lengths to follow what you have to say.

Know more stuff about how to get more attention on social media? Please share it in the comments section.