Blog of website & interfaces designer, Darran Morris.

Twitter is great. It allows quick messaging between people, without the pressing need for a response that you get with instant messaging. It is relaxed and easy to use. It is also a great way to network and do business.

Twitter has an incredibly sparse (but deliberately so), user interface. This makes it very easy to use but that doesn’t allow much room for personal information in the user profile. Having as much info as possible on frequently accessed profile pages like this is really valuable for businesses. 

Twitter background images allow you to get around this, in a way. You can create background images in most image editors. Photoshop (if you have it), Paint Shop Pro (paid), or GIMP (free!) would be some great examples. Now, I would recommend getting an experienced designer to create this for you, to create that clean, professional edge. But you can create it yourself. 

Basically what you want, is to create a section on the side of the image that contains a photo and some text  that gives a friendly intro to what you do. It is also a good idea to include some links in the text to any web presence that you and/or your company has. 

Here’s an example from my profile (click on it to see it in action on my Twitter page):

I have made the image quite large so that even people with large monitors will see a uniform background. 

Below you can find a template that will allow you to create your own backgrounds. This template is a basic guide to the areas where you should put elements such as your logo, photo, extended bio and links. It should get you started. You can download this template in psd for Photoshop, or png for most other editors.

So download the above image, change the style to reflect your brand and add your info.  Do this and you should have a great profile that will be both informative, useful in getting you more followers, could also generate some business relationships and even leads!

I’ve been looking into ways to connect all of the social media services that I use so that they update each other. There can be so many different profiles now to keep up to date, that it can just take too much time to manually update each of them.

There seems to be plenty of different approaches around, but some just didn’t seem to fit for me. Most of the social apps have open API’s now which should allow connectivity between them all.

The first thing I did was to connect my Twitter to the new Facebook status update. You can do this using this Facebook app by Twitter themselves. So, now I all my tweets appear in my personal Facebook status. 

The next step is to connect the blog with Twitter. This turned out to be really easy too. We use Wordpress here at Poly, and there are a range of plugins which allow you to achieve this. The one I found is called Twitter-tools. It has plenty of options available to create a full two-way integration between your blog and Twitter. Actually, this post will be my first test of how this works.

The final piece of the puzzle is integrating all this with the Poly Facebook page. Facebook have now also updated how Pages work. They are now really similar to user profiles, and are complete with a Wall, photo tab and more. What I would ultimately love, is to connect my twitter feed to the Wall on the Poly page. That would complete this little circle. This blog post from Duct Tape Marketing comes very close to working this out. There is a Facebook app called RSS-Connect which allows you to display an RSS feed on your page in a separate tab and also in a box, but it still doesn’t allow you to stream new entries to the Wall on a page. If I could find a way of getting the posts or the Twitter feed on the Wall, we would be sorted.