5 tips to ease your transition to the new Twitter profile

We’re here to help you keep current with major changes to social media when managing strategies to promote your nonprofit fundraising organization online. Whether you’re looking to attract new donors or communicate with existing ones, chances are that Twitter is already one of your regular channels.

As I wrote a few months ago, Twitter are now unrolling a completely new profile page which would see major visual changes to your profile. Now (for most users) that these changes are arriving, on initial inspection it is much bigger, much bolder, arguably louder and definitely uncannily similar to Facebook. It also looks quite a bit like Google+ and at a glance it could be easy to forget which platform you’re currently using and I can’t say I find that especially useful. Whether that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen but what’s important is that you get your profile page updated to incorporate all of the new changes. Don’t worry if your own profile page is yet to show the update, it will change during the coming days/weeks and the information below can help you get ready for the changes.

If your page hasn’t switched over and you want to know what to expect just visit Michelle Obama’s Twitter account for a preview of the updates, you have been warned, everything is big and quite different. (*these visual changes are most relevant to desktop and laptop users, on your mobile things will appear much as they were). You’ll also see an example of a new profile page in today’s blog post image.

It’s all rather large: The first thing that you’ll notice is that space for the background photo is huge and much like a Facebook header image. Inside the background image your profile photo will reside centred near the top of the page. Looking for your bio? You’ll find it superimposed on the background image at the bottom left of that space. As you can see you’ll need a wider/more horizontal image to fill this space, Twitter have suggested sizing of 1500px by 500px although it will resize automatically if you choose something different (although it will stretch/compact as needed so your best bet is to edit your image to the correct dimensions).

Bigger Profile Photos: You’ll also notice that the placeholder for your profile image is larger and completely square. Twitter advise 400px x 400px so go ahead and make those changes too, once again resizing will occur if you add an image with different dimensions. The existing/old space was for a profile photo which was much smaller so if you don’t make the needed changes it probably isn’t going to look very good.

Pinning Tweets: If you are experienced with blogging you are probably familiar with the practice of ‘pinning’ a post / ‘making it sticky’ – which essentially means it will remain at the top of your page as the newest post no matter what you add to the site after it was originally posted. This can be useful for a particularly popular post or a time-sensitive piece of news. Twitter now allows you to do the same by pinning any favourite Tweet to the top of the page. It’s a great idea to allow you to highlight something for a couple of days but don’t forget to change out your pinned tweet otherwise a positive can quickly become a negative if you introduce your page feed with a tweet that is weeks or months old.

Here’a a look at the new Twitter profile page, you’re not alone if it reminds you of Facebook or Google+ (click to enlarge)

Build A Longer Bio: I was hoping beyond hope that the bio section (below your Twitter account name) would be expanded to allow the user to provide a far more comprehensive overview of themselves, their company/organization. For years the limitation of the bio length at 140 characters has meant a contracted summary which is often less than ideal. The good news? Twitter have lengthened the bio length. The bad news? They’ve only increased the length from 140 to 160 characters, but all the same take the time to use those additional 20 spaces to rework your bio and improve it where you can. Your bio remains an important part of being found and followed on Twitter and as you probably know it’s the optimal place to add search engine keywords to help your cause.

Improved Filtering: A great time-saver when viewing the Twitter feeds of other accounts and long overdue. You can now select which timeline to view when viewing other user profiles, this change allows you to choose to see either Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies. Especially useful when you are skimming updates or seeking specific content.

I’ll continue seeing what other more subtle changes have been made with the updates to Twitter but armed with the information about the five key changes above you should be ready to embrace the changes to Twitter instead of getting sidetracked by them. If you have any other Twitter tips, questions or observations please add them to the comments.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services