Your twitter bio, background and photograph/icon are the only elements that remain consistent throughout your page. Your bio is basically the place to tell the twitter-world what you tweet about. 90% of the time it is the first thing that people will read in search results and when visiting your page, so it is important to optimise it to display the correct information about yourself or your brand to help make your page easily searchable to potential followers.

Twitter limits your bio to 160 characters. This means that you have to be quite savvy to get the most out of this space to gain the maximum amount of followers. The following key factors will tell you what information you should include in your bio. This will then be followed by the most efficient methods of how best to compact and optimise this information into the 160 character limit.

Key factors for your twitter bio:

The key factors for your twitter bio are information to let a user know what you will be tweeting about,who you are and optional links to relevant content.

What do you specialise in:

The reason people use twitter is to share and gain knowledge via tweets, so it is advantage and in your best interest to share what you specialise. this will allow the user to see if the information that you will share will be of any use to them.

Your personality:

In general people like to know who the person who is behind the tweets after all twitter is a social network. A little bit of information about your personal interests can help you gain followers and humanise your page, but beware it can also alienate your audience for example, posting that you are an avid Manchester United Fan could turn avid Liverpool FC fans away from following you, unless of course you are tweeting about Manchester United. Instead I would recommend that you post that you are an avid Football fan as this shows your interest in football in a more general sense.

Websites / Blogs / Social Media Links:

This is a great place to promote and advertise websites, blogs and social media links (yours or other peoples) that provide similar information to what knowledge you will be sharing as it is constantly displayed on your page.

Optimising your bio:

OK, so now you know what information you need in your bio how do you go about optimising it?

As I mentioned earlier you are only limited to 160 characters so the main aim is to get as much relevant (and I stress the word ‘relevant’) into your bio to gain the right followers. The best route to take is to use key-words, this keeps it simple and efficient for a user to read to make the decision to to follow you or not. IT also makes it easier for searches to pick up these words and display your page against them in twiters/google/bings search results.

Now I’m not saying to write a short list of key words along with with a website address for your bio, this just looks spammy, unprofessional and impersonal. E.g.

SEO, web design, graphics, marketing. http://www.marketingblog.com

Would you be interested in following a page with this as its bio?

The best way to do this is to add your key words into a sentence, making it look a lot more human and personal e.g.

Champion of marketing, design and interested in all things web. Avid Football Fan and co-writer of http://www.marketingblog.com – for up to date marketing tips

This gives the user relevant information about what you do, contains key-words for searches, gives a hint of a personal interest and includes a link to your website.

Try these other tips:

*Remember, although people can’t see you treat your bio as your introduction to the world. Only post here what you would like others to know in real life, some things to avoid:

• Vulgar or offensive language.
• Links to inappropriate pages.

AND FINALLY

Remember to spell everything correctly! Nothing screams unprofessional more than a spelling mistake!

Following these steps will help you gain more followers and rank higher in search engines. We hope you have found this information interesting.

Now go and update that bio!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Twitter Tip 1 - Claim your name as soon as possible:

Twitter has fast become the 2^nd highest used social media network, with 175 million+ users and this means that a considerable amount of names have already been taken. I would recommend signing up as soon as possible to claim your name.

Twitter Tip 2 - Think about your audience:

Think about your audience and what they will be searching for.  Your Twitter name is a powerful influence on how you rank in search engines (google / bing etc) and twitters own search results. It is your identity, so when using the service consider using a name as close to your own name, your brand name or your online alias, as this will ensure that people will be able to recognise you or your company and find you with ease.

If you can’t find a name close enough to represent your brand use a key word to appear in searches that supports the subject you will be tweeting about e.g. if you are going to predominantly tweet about social media and your name is ‘Tim’ agood example of a name would be - @socialmediatim.

Twitter Tip 3 - Keep your name as short as possible:

(Your username can contain up to 15 characters) Twitter only allows you to type 140 characters per tweet, so try and keep your name as short as possible for when people retweet your tweet or mention you, giving them more space for their input.

Twitter Tip 4 - Try and avoid the use of underscores:

Twitter has a high number of mobile users, and not all mobile phones feature an easy to access underscore button, in general people prefer to be able to log on and type in a simple name to search for or mention you in a tweet. It also sounds much more professional when saying it aloud to someone for example @socialmediatim is short and to the point …@social_media_tim becomes social underscore media underscore Tim, quite a mouthful.

Twitter Tip 5- Changing your username:

If you have a twitter account already you may be familiar with the fact that you can change your name as often as you like, although this is good for experimentation to see what username works best for you and your brand, I would recommend that you don’t change it too often as people become familiar with your username and will use it to search for you.

Twitter Tip 6 - What to avoid:

Try to stay away from using vulgar or offensive words / terms (unless of course this is what you will be tweeting about) In general people will stay away from these profiles as not many people want to respond to or retweet from somebody with an offensive name. Treat it as you are introducing yourself to 175 million+ people in real life and use common sense.

We hope you find this post helpful and will be posting other ways to optimise your twitter page in our next post.

You can tweet any twitter or other social media questions you may have at us @socialjamm or post them in the comment box below!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm