Here’s a secret about me, I’m not really an ‘early adopter’ – someone who explores the next big thing as soon as it’s out. I prefer to hang back, test it out, see how useful it is before I commit.

Which is why I didn’t write about this before now…

Towards the end of last year Twitter had a little re-design of profiles pages. The biggest change was a visual one: the addition of the header. A more prominent place to add an image that grabs the attention of anyone visiting your profile.

The idea? To give your profile more personality and branding, of course!

That means there are now 3 visual areas of your Twitter profile that you can customise:

• The profile picture (really, really important to have a profile picture – this is shown next to all of your tweets)
• The profile background (a good place to add your branding but not nearly as important as the profile picture)
• The new header picture (read on to see how important this area is)

The reason I stalled on creating a header for myself and suggesting everyone else did was because I wasn’t convinced that many Twitter users actually visited profile pages (personally, I hardly ever do).

So I conducted a (very unscientific) survey…

I asked my peeps on Twitter and Facebook, in Twitter Brilliance and some masterminding groups whether they visited other Twitter profiles.

73% of people surveyed said;

yes especially when looking for new connections…

What’s more, the header picture is visible on all devices: computer, smartphone and tablet (your background is not) which I’d say makes it more important than your profile background.

So there you have it – a great reason to get your Twitter header beautified!

Make it happen!

• Head over to your Twitter profile and edit profile (it’s the big cog icon in the top right – you’ll have to be logged in to do this)
• In the Profile section underneath ‘change photo’, choose ‘change header’
• You can either upload a picture from your computer, have one designed or create one yourself using Picmonkey
• The image dimensions are 1252×626 and the maximum file size is 5MB
• Once uploaded you can zoom the image in or out and drag it for best placement so don’t worry too much about the dimensions – just use them as a guide

Bonus Tip: Don’t have too much going on in the background and use a dark colour image as your bio text will appear over the top in white (Twitter automagically darkens whatever image you upload to this area too).

Get to it and swing by my to show me the results (remember to add a link to your Twitter page so I can check it out).