First Things You Must Do After You Created Your New Twitter Account

1 Apr 2009

So you have just created your brand new Twitter account, what now?
Your instinct and indeed Twitter itself would tell you that you should start typing your first Tweet or to follow as many people as you can.

What's Next?

Stop right there immediately!

That’s what spam-bot does, and you don’t want to be associated with these kinds now do you?

Unless you don’t want me to follow you back, please take a little bit of your time and do the followings:

1. Visit your Account information on your Settings page (the link is on the menu-bar at the top-right corner of your Twitter page).
In the account page, please fill in as much as possible the information about your Time Zone, URL, One Line Bio and Location.

Twitter Account Settings

I tell you why these informations are very important:

First of all, Twitter is about Social Networking, with a big emphasize on the word ‘Social‘. So, you would want to provide (read ‘Share‘) as much information as possible about yourself. This will help the people you are following to get to know you a bit better; e.g. where you come from, what’s your hobby, what things you like, or whether you have a website that they can look up. All these would make your relationship with people you are following to start on a higher level of comfort, also they would be more likely to follow you back.

Secondly, many of the 3rd party Twitter Apps out there, that provide directory or people search service, would use these information in their app. This means that if you fill in those fields with appropriate info, there would be a good chance that other Twitter Users will be able to find you easily (and accurately).
For example: TwitterCounter will show you the Twitter Top Rank for user from a particular TimeZone.

A special mention about ‘Protect My Updates‘ functionality, which will make your Tweets invisible to people other than your followers (normally your Tweets will be visible to the world, including Google). If you are thinking to make your Tweets, in another word, Private, please reconsider. This is probably just me, but I like to read what you Tweet before I follow you (back), which is not possible if you Protect your update. Your updates are like a window through which your to-be-follower can understand what’s on on your mind, and can decide if you are indeed worth to be followed.

You are is what you Tweet!

2. Upload your Profile Picture. Please for the love of God, change the default picture to any picture of your choosing. I mean ‘anything’, I don’t care what it is, just not that brown default picture.

Twitter Picture Setting

First impression always counts! In this case, your picture will be the first thing that people would notice when they visit your Twitter Page. And for ‘some’ people it could be the deciding factor in the following process, especially if you are a stranger to them.

3. Additionally, you can check the setting on notices. This governs how you want Twitter to notify you on certain eventualities (e.g. when someone follows you, or when you receive a direct message).

Twitter Notices Setting

4. If you want you can change your Twitter Page design, this includes changing colors on your page and the page background. If you are not the arty type, Twitter provides you with a list of predefined themes, which you can choose for your page.