Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows users to have multiple accounts, so for example, you might want to keep your author account separate from your personal life (I don’t, but I do keep the book promotion side of my business separate from the editing side.)
Signing up to Twitter is easy:
You just visit the sign up page and enter your name, email address, a password and a username (limited to 15 characters)
Once you’ve entered all your details, click sign up, and you’ll be taken to a welcome page:
How polite.
Click through this page and you’ll be asked to select some categories of interest:
Select those you like, and on the next page, a handful of Twitter accounts to follow will be suggested to you. You don’t have to select them all – deselect the ones you don’t want to follow as you can add so many more later.
Next comes the opportunity to upload your profile picture. I skipped through this, but click on upload if you’re ready to do this now. Your profile picture should be 400 pixels wide, by 400 pixels in height.
Next on the list are followers, and you are given the opportunity to search your contact lists on Gmail, AOL, Outlook and Yahoo to see if any of these contacts reside on Twitter. If the users have opted to be found via email, you will be presented with their Twitter account to follow.
And that’s you signed up. Clicking through to the next page will take you the main Twitter screen. You will be asked to confirm your email, but the account is good to go.
However…
As this is an author/promotion account, there’s a few last steps you might want to follow:
Navigate to the top right and click the box in-between the search and tweet buttons (in red in the image below) and navigate to view profile.
To add a cover photo and write a little bit about yourself, click edit profile (beneath the cover photo area):
You will now be presented with the editing options – Name, Bio, Location, Website, and of course the two areas in which you can upload photograpahs – the cover photo and a smaller profile picture.
The dimensions of the cover photograph are 1500 pixels wide and 500 pixels in height. The profile picture is 400 x 400 pixels.
The website url doesn’t need to be to a website or blog, you can link it to your Amazon page, or Facebook, whichever you believe will be the most beneficial.
The Bio is a short space to write a short description, for which you are allowed 160 characters, so be selective in what you say.
Theme colours. I believe you can design Twitter pages, although I’ve not tested this out myself.
And that is it.
You are now ready to tweet to the world, but before you disappear, a word of warning, well, a couple actually:
- Don’t go on a ‘Follow’ user frenzy. If you like too many people in a short space of time (like hundreds in the space of a day) your account will be considered suspicious and you may be blocked.
- You can only follow a maximum of 2,000 followers. To follow more, you need to build up the numbers of people following you.
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