This is part of a series of short blogs which will be posted over the next few weeks and will be focusing on Twitter – including Twitter Posting, Building Your Reach on Twitter, How to Use Twitter Hashtags, What is Twitter Chat, How to Manage Twitter Effectively, How to Monitor Twitter and Measure ROI, How to Generate Leads and Sales on Twitter, Twitter Promotions and more!

How to Set Up and Optimise Your Twitter Account

When you set up your Twitter account it is really important that you optimise it – not only will this help with your rankings in search results – but it will also ensure consistency for your brand and ensure potential followers have come to the right place.

1. Use a good quality photo or logo as your profile picture / avatar – make sure this matches what you use on other social networks and your website for consistency and credibility. Also ensure it is the correct size so you can view the thumbnail correctly and that the logo is not cut off when it is resized to a thumbnail – how to create a profile picture for Twitter

2. Create a custom background in line with your branding – this link will take you to a video to help you set up your background – if you are unable to do this yourself and need help creating this then get in touch with me or your designer.

3. Make sure you complete and fill out all your details and adjust the colours in “design” to match your brand and help your background image blend in to the background when viewed on various computer screen sizes.

4. Make sure your Twitter page includes your company name, logo and URLs so people can check you are not a spammer and it gives your page and brand credibility. Urls to other site will also help drive people to your sites you wish to send them to.

5. Keep twitter handles (your twitter username @…. ) spam-free – for example “@name23″ could be disregarded not only by potential followers but also by Google as they cannot differentiate who is real or not – be unique and professional and try use your company name and a name that that can be easily remembered and identified.

6. Include keywords in your bio profile and make sure it is attention-grabbing as this description may show up in search results or on other social profiles such as Klout that pull in your Twitter bio.

7. You can also use #keywords in your profile for example #twitter if it is relevant to what you tweet about – but don’t go overboard!

TIP TO TAKE AWAY: I quite often come across “this person has protected their tweets” – I don’t really see the purpose of this and feel this can be a barrier to getting new followers amongst a huge amount of other disadvantages. If you are trying to avoid spammers and they do follow you then simply don’t follow them back, don’t thank them with @ and ignore them and hopefully they will soon leave again or just BLOCK them – check out this blog on the 10 Reasons to NOT Protect Your Tweets

So once you have done the above then what do you post about? How do you get people to follow you and engage? How do you drive people to your Twitter page? Take a look at our next blog on How to Post on Twitter

About Karen Black

Karen Black is a Co-founder and Director of Mamba Media, a boutique digital marketing agency based in the UK. Karen works with a range of starts ups, individuals and small businesses to develop their website & digital marketing strategy (social media, email, video, blogging) and grow their business online. Karen also offers social media training and digital marketing consulting to businesses.