Twitter Backgrounds are Branding Machines

I don’t use Twitter as much as I probably should, and I actually use it for more of a blog feed than anything else. No matter how you use Twitter, it’s important to get your name and brand across. With that being said, think about your Twitter account and how many people are visiting your profile page ever day, weekly or even yearly. Even if YOU aren’t actively posting on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t visiting your page, so it’s important to leave a lasting impression.

Twitter Backgrounds Leave an Immediate Impression

What’s the first thing you see when you visit someones Twitter page? Most likely it’s their background image. Not only do the backgrounds give us a creative insight on what the person is about, but it’s also a cool way to get your message or web site across. Who are you, what’s your business and how can I learn more about you? These are all different topics that you can use in your background.

Since going live with a new blog design, I thought it would be a good idea to change things up and go with a new Twitter background as well. You can see the new background below, which was designed by DesignPax.com.

My New Favorite Twitter Background – View Full Profile

My first Twitter background had some basic information on myself and where you could visit my blog and social pages. This time around, I just wanted to go for a big branded effort and get “ZacJohnson.com” across to the user.

Excellent Twitter Backgrounds and Resources

What are some of you favorite and most memorable Twitter backgrounds that you’ve come across while scouring around Twitter? Instead of running to Twitter and having to visit all of your followers pages individual, many design blogs have done the work for us. I love looking through galleries of Twitter backgrounds and seeing the creative ideas and designs that people come up with. Below are a few sites that feature some of the best designs we’ve all come across.

Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices
100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds
42 Twitter Backgrounds
40 Cool Twitter Backgrounds
25 of the Best Designed Twitter Homepages

If you don’t have your own unique Twitter background, you should! It’s free branding that may be getting seen by hundreds, if not thousands of people daily. Get creative and design your own Twitter background, or find someone that specializes in design work, like I did with DesignPax.com.

What’s the inspiration for your Twitter background, or some of the favorite designs you’ve come across?

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A Second Look: 6 Types of Twitter Tools That Come in Handy

Tweet

We go over so many tools here are Blogging Tips that many of them are often forgotten as they’re buried deeper into the archives.

I thought it would be nice to go over a few Twitter tools that are useful and definitely worth a second look. If you’re an avid Twitter user, it’s a good idea to use a tool from each of these categories to help with productivity, build your brand and get the most out of Twitter. Since this list only includes past posts from Blogging Tips, it will not address any new tools (which I’m sure there are many of) that may exist in each category; so feel free to add those additional tools in the comments!

Schedule Your Tweets

If you don’t have much time to spend on Twitter yet still want to appear active, 3 of the tools listed on 5 Ways to Schedule Your Tweets (2 are no longer available) can help you schedule future tweets. Scheduling tweets is also great for promoting a product or service. You can schedule 1-2 tweets per day for a certain amount of time, but just be sure to change up the wording as much as possible for each tweets. Twitvance is also a great tool for scheduling unlimited tweets.

Clean Out Your Followers

If you are following over 200 or even 100 people on Twitter, it’s just impossible to manually clean out your followers (ie. inactive users, spammers, etc). You’d have to go to the page of each user and then look at their tweets to see when the last one was posted and then check out what type of content their posting. No one has time for that! Luckily, there are lots of tools out there to help you clean out your followers. None of the tools listed on 4 Twitter Account Cleaners are still around, but the tools listed on Four More Twitter Account Cleaners along with Refollow are sure to come in handy.

Sift Through The Junk

Let’s face it, the amount of spam and shameless promotion on Twitter is getting out of hand. There is so much that it is often hard to find anything useful in your Twitter stream. After using one of the Twitter cleaners above it shouldn’t be so much of a problem, but just in case here are a few tools to help you filter through the junk and find the tweets that matter: Cascaad, TidyTweet and Filttr.

Shorten Your URLs

Most Twitter tools come with an integrated URL shortener, but surprisingly Twitter.com does not have that feature (yet). So if you are in need of a short URL or want to tool to help you condense URLs while browsing check out 9 Short URL Services and 8 URL Shorteners for Quickly Sharing Links.

Keep Up via Alerts

If you’re an extremely busy person, keeping up with Twitter can be impossible and hiring help is just out of the question for most. Having to login each day and look through thousands of tweets can be a pain and many users just give up from frustration. If you’re looking for a more convenient way to keep up with Twitter, then opting to receive alerts is a good idea. With TwitterAlerts you can receive notifications by SMS, email or IM for an unlimited number of keywords. If you want to keep up with specific users instead, I find that IFTTT handles that job quite well.

Backup Your Tweets

Lastly, you want to be sure that you are backing up your tweets on a regular basis. There is nothing worse than building up a Twitter account for a year or two and then losing it all (trust me, I know). Plus, there’s always something weird going on at Twitter and users often complain about missing tweets. You can save yourself the hassle by using one of these 10 Twitter Backup Tools for Preserving Tweets (plus 8 bonus options at the end). You know what they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry; make sure you’re safe!

(image source)

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Share and Tweet Your Emotions with Smood.it

Tweet

There’s a new microblogging platform in town and it’s called Smood.it. On the site you can share your smood with the world; the word smood is “a syneresis of two words: smile and mood.” Smood.it calls itself a “micro(emo)blogging” services since it’s more focused on letting you share your emotions rather than a simple status message.

Smood.it offers all of the basic features like a profile, the ability to invite and search for friends as well as a timeline view that showcases the smoods of those you follow. In addition you can keep up with your weekly mood (that is if you use the site consistently).

There are two simple steps to sharing your smood:

1. Pick one of six emoticons that describes your mood. The choices are: joy, surprise, love, anger, fear and sadness.

2. Tag your mood with words that describe why you’re feeling that way; you can also use URLs here. Previous used tags from the community will appear below the text box as you type.

Once your done, your smood will appear as picture below, with the emoticon and tags. Clicking on each tag will, as expected, take you to a page where you can see others who have used the same tag.

Connect Your Twitter Account

Smood is tightly integrated with Twitter. When you first sign up, you have the option of signing up via Twitter OAuth. Be aware that by default, your smoods will be set to auto-post to Twitter. You can, however, turn this off under settings. You can also customize how your tweet will look when it posts, which is a nice addition that not many sites offer.

Alternately and also in addition, you can have your tweets post as smoods to Smood.it. This is also something that is set by default, but can be changed under settings. It seems as though Smood.it scans your tweets, gets a feel for the mood of them and then automatically sets one of the six emoticon for them. As for that tags, it uses the URL in your tweet (if one is included), the users mentioned (if you @mention anyone) and hashtags that you may have used.

I do like being able to quickly share how I’m feeling on Smood.it. Sometimes a simple emoticon (as opposed to a text status message) is the best way to describe my current mood and Smood.it makes this possible.

While the community does not seem very active, it may just be because it is hard to find other users (besides clicking on tags). Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to “like,” comment or reply to others’ smoods. Of course, these are just some of the missing functionalities that come with an early beta site, so I’m anxious to see how Smood.it progresses.

Once again, here’s another site that I’d really love to use often and hope that I will remember to do so. What are your thoughts?

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Twitter Opens Advertising Opps to the Masses

For quite a while now everyone and their brother has been lobbing the “when are you going to really monetize Twitter” bombs into the micro-blogging giant’s front yard. It’s a popular thing to do but as of late that cry has lost a little steam (in part due to having real business people like Dick Costolo at the helm) and the latest move by Twitter could put a dent in one of the Internet industry’s favorite pastimes for sure.

The Next Web first reported the new Twitter for Business section and reported

The new version of business.twitter.com will provide business owners with twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources. Some of the tools included are information on promoted products and tutorials one how to communicate with customers using mobile.

Twitter’s business tools range from basic tips “What is Twitter” to more in-depth information on analytics, case studies, API integration etc.

The main page looks like this and the big attention getter is on the right side, which might as well read “Give Us Your Wallet”

Twitter is no longer just giving advertising a try with a few select folks. Now it’s official that Twitter is really open for business. It’s kind of sad to watch the old “Twitter is cool but hasn’t made a red cent” days go away. Now we have to look at Twitter as a legitimate business. Now whether what they do is meaningful is whole other story.

Along with this new way to get into advertisers pocketbooks, Twitter has updated its Twitter 101 offering with a new presentation of its old material and additional updates.

It appears now that Twitter is moving into the next phase of its development. How well it will work remains to be seen. Does advertising on Twitter give advertisers the best bang for their buck? Will more advertising be a positive or negative influence on the overall experience? To listen to Jason Falls tell it to ReadWriteWeb you certainly get one possible side of the argument clearly.

“Selling trending topics is like gaming Digg,” Falls said.

“Twitter is inviting marketing money bags to completely ruin the organic nature of the tool. When I look at something like that, I tell clients, ‘They’re just whores for your money.’ It’s obvious they’re making Facebook-like errors to try and compensate for the fact they never had a business model in mind when they built this thing.”

Yikes.

It’s too early to tell anything at this point but it does appear as if 2011 will be the Year of Real Revenue Generation for Twitter. If it isn’t then how much longer will investors put up with the excuses / reasons for not making much to this point?

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Building Your Business Through Logo Branding

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Logo Mojo. All opinions are 100% mine.

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the past few years while running this blog, it’s the power of a good logo. The Zac Johnson toon has taken on a life of it’s own and has become a very recognized symbol in the affiliate marketing and blogging niche. Without the extra branding from this logo and having it seen all over the place, it would be tough to achieve the same success the blog has seen over the past few years.

Not currently using a logo or design to brand your blog or business? You should be. Imprint an imagine in the minds of your followers, readers and customers. Doing so will not only allow them to remember a symbol and not just a name, but it helps extraordinarily for your branding purposes. Pepsi, Apple and Nike are all recognized by their logos… not their names. Twitter has been an amazing tool for branding purposes. If you are using Twitter and just have a basic background, you are missing out free branding and advertising every day. Most of the big name bloggers and branded companies have their own Twitter backgrounds which usually include their logo, web site name and personal or company info.

As easy as it sounds to brand yourself, it’s actually one of the hardest tasks to accomplish. First you have to think about what type of message and visual appearance your logo is going to display. Since the majority of us are not designers, you will also have to find someone to design your logo and make it look professional. I’m going through this process all the time, as I like to launch new web sites with only the highest designs and with their own unique logos. Logo Mojo

is a design company that actually covers the majority of what I talked about above. I’m always looking for new quality designers to work on projects. After looking through their site and portfolio, they have a nice selection of logos that they’ve designed, and compared to other design services, they prices are quite reasonable. The design process is laid out really well on the web site, as it walks you through the process on how to best describe your logo concept and how you would like it to be perceived.

Whether you are looking to have a new logo identity created for your web site, blog or Twitter, it’s a great idea to visit Logo Mojo. Not only can you get inspired by their designs and tips, but walking through their design questionnaire will also help you determine the look and feel you are trying to get with your new logo.

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This Sunday You’re Invited to #Blogchat to Talk Monetizing Blogs

One of my favorite times of the week on Twitter is on Monday mornings, my time (Sunday night for many of you), when Twitter comes alive with #blogchat.

#blogchat is a hashtag on Twitter that ties together hundreds of bloggers all talking about a particular aspect of blogging for an hour or so. It starts at 8pm Central US time, and usually revolves around a specific topic and/or guest host. Bloggers exchange ideas, ask questions, and network. It’s a frenzy of activity, which can seem a little overwhelming, but once you get into the swing of it, it’s a lot of fun.

You can learn more about #BlogChat and how to participate here.

This coming Sunday/Monday (depending where in the world you’re located), I’m cohosting #blogchat and we’ll be looking at the topic, “How to Monetize Your Blog.”

I’ve got a little information prepared to share, but the hour (and I’ll probably hang out for longer) will largely be an exchange of ideas. I’m happy to answer as many questions as I can during the hour—so if you have any, do come prepared.

I’ve also promised a few people to give a bit of the backstory behind my upcoming project, @Feelgooder (which I hope to soft launch in the coming week).

Remember: it’s on at 8pm Central US time on Sunday night. So mark it in your calendar, set up a way to follow the #blogchat hashtag, and follow me on Twitter at @ProBlogger!

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The Blogosphere is Alive with the Sound of Marketers

While Twitter and Facebook are all the rage with your average internet user, blogs are still going strong in the corporate world.

According to a study by eMarketer, 34% of all US companies have a public blog and they project 45% by 2012. That’s up tremendously from 2007 which lands at only 16%.

“Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service.”

The study suggests that there is a larger number of blogs devoted to smaller companies, where larger companies may be lagging due to legal and logistical issues. It’s a lot easier for George to upload an off-the-cuff blog post when he’s the CEO of a two man company than it is for a VP at Procter and Gamble to make his thoughts known.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging over micro-blogging is the evergreen nature. A blog post is searchable and indexable as long as blog site shall live. That means consumers can easily revisit the information a month from now or a year from now. Try doing that with a Facebook post or a Twitter message that’s more than a month old.

Ideally, a combination of social media messaging is the way to go. A Twitter tweet leads readers to the blog post which leads them on to the Facebook via a “like” button at the top of the post. Of course, for all of this to work as it should, you have to have something interesting to say and that’s the hardest part of blogging.

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