How to set up a Twitter or Facebook account – common questions answered

Published on May 17, 2010 How to set up a Twitter or Facebook account – common questions answered

Setting up a Twitter or Facebook account to help in your online store marketing is easy, but there are some common questions our customers ask us all the time.

Here is a quick guide to some common questions like: How to add your own logo to your Twitter site? What type of Facebook account do you need? What does the “not a valid email address” error mean when you’re setting up an account in Facebook? How do you add your own Twitter background?

How do you add your own logo to your Twitter site?

The Twitter logo is there to stay on your Twitter feed (it’s their site after all), but you can add your own logo to the site by creating a custom background. See below for some step-by-step instructions on how to create a Twitter background.

What type of Facebook account do you need?

Businesses have two options when creating a Facebook account: setting up the account as a “Business” account (which you can only do if you do not already have an individual account) or setting up a “Personal” account which you can use to profile yourself and the business you run. To set up your business account, you either create a Facebook page or create a Facebook advertisement for your business.

What does the “not a valid email address” error mean when setting up a Facebook account?

Even if you have an email address in the right format, e.g., info@yourdomain.com, Facebook may still give you a “not a valid email address” error when you are setting up your account.  If this occurs check the email address you are using – if it has something really common and generic like info@yourdomain.com you’ll get that error. They don’t allow certain generic addresses even on a business account. We recommend you set up facebook@yourdomain.com and use that.

How do you add your own Twitter background?

A Twitter background allows you to add your own logo, images and build your brand. It’s a great way of building a consistent brand across a number of different marketing channels. There are no set rules for Twitter backgrounds and one of the main problems you can run into is that different computers have different screen resolutions. Most people these days have screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 or better, so we would suggest that you use this as the minimum resolution that you design your background to work with.

Not everyone has the same graphic tools that we use at Ozcart to design websites, so here’s a quick step by step guide for people that do not have costly professional graphics tools:

1. Start by downloading the graphics program that you want to use. A good shareware one you could try is Paint Shop Pro
2. Set up a document for your background.  Try a width of 1280px or more, and a height of 768px or more.
3. Using the square drawing tool in your graphics program draw a square in the middle of the document that is 760 pixels wide and 70 pixels high. Push it right up to the top middle of the page. This is the area that is taken up by the Twitter logo and can’t really be changed.
4. Design the rest of your background. The area directly underneath the box you have drawn in step 3 will be the area where your tweets will appear. You might want to draw a dotted box 1024 x 768 and place that in the middle of the screen as well so you can see where your background will be cut off on lower resolutions.
5. Save your image as a JPG or GIF image. We suggest you use JPG as the file sizes are smaller and the number of colours are higher in JPG images.
6. Go into into your Twitter account and choose settings.
7. Click on the Design tab.
8. Click on Change Background and find the file you just saved in Paint Shop Pro. Make sure that the Tile Image checkbox is not ticked.
9. Click on the Change design colours link in Twitter. Set the background colour to something that looks good against your background. Often a dark colour will look good – it depends on your design.

Give it a try and see how it looks!