Create a customized Twitter background

As a financial advisor looking to get noticed, it makes sense to take advantage of each marketing opportunity. Creating a customized Twitter background is one of these perfect opportunities. While having a customized background won’t get more people to actually click on your name, it will likely make your visitors linger a little longer.

Step 1: Decide on the layout, color scheme and content. With the new Twitter layout, there is less room on the left hand side than before. Decide the most important item for your followers to see. What you look like? What book you’ve written? How to contact you?

Step 2: Design your background. You need an image editing program, like Photoshop, for this step. You first need to create a new image file, and you can choose to input a certain resolution to determine the size of your image. To save you some effort, Mashable has created some basic Photoshop files you can use to create your background and bypass a few initial steps.

Once you have created your file, use the various editing tools to input text, graphics and special effects. Keep in mind, you only have about 112 pixels of empty space to input content on the left-hand side without it interfering with Twitter’s layout. We recommend you do not put any text or images beyond this tiny left-hand margin–and none on the right-hand side either–as it will be hard to align the spaces properly.

Also, the spacing on the left and right sides of the columns is fluid, meaning the amount of space changes depending on the resolution and size of your browser. The Twitter sidebar on the right is semi-opaque, so you need to make sure if you put anything here, it is readable.