Twitter Week: A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

images.jpgThis week is Twitter week at HighEdWebTech. Each day this week, I hope to explore an area of Twitter and hopefully share some thoughts and best practices. Of course, I’m on Twitter and you can find me and follow me here.

I think it’s safe to say that Twitter’s hit the main stream. It’s certainly a hot topic in all areas of college marketing, from enrollment marketing to fundraising.

Today, I’d like to talk about your account’s icon – that little 73 pixel by 73 pixel area in the left-hand corner of your account’s page.

Your account’s icon may be one of the most important thing you enter when you are setting up account. Seriously – and here’s why.

Your followers may not be getting your tweets at Twitter.com – they may be using a client like Twitterific, TweetDeck, Nambu, Seesmic or Tweetie. Whether you follow 15 people or 1,500, looking at people’s icons is a quick and easy way to see who’s talking and you can quickly decide if you’re going to pay attention.

If you don’t set the icon, users see this:

That’s not terribly useful. This, on the other hand, is useful:

Picture 1.png

Your school’s icon can be your logo, your seal, your wordmark, your marketing phrase, a picture of your campus’ version of “Old Main,” just make sure your icon makes people know it’s your school. Here’s an example of an icon that’s getting cut off by Twitter.

That’s the logo for North Dakota State’s Twitter account. As you can see, the entire letter N is cut off and at quick glance, you don’t know who that account holder is. The icons for their other accounts are good, for example the icon for their bookstore’s account is good:

Here are few other ones that are getting cut off, are hard to read, or don’t clearly state what school they are :

I’m fortunate that for the past six years, I’ve had an awesome graphic designer, Penny Frank (@), working down the hall from me and we’ve collaborated on a ton of projects.

Last week, she redesigned many of our account icons. We wanted to make sure that they all had their own personality, but contained Allegheny flavor – colors, fonts, treatments, etc. Here they are, I think they’re great.

I’d love to have you post your account icons in the comments or point everyone towards a few that you think are very well done. I’ll gather them up and feature them in a post later on this week.

2 thoughts on “Twitter Week: A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words”

  1. The University of Delaware Alumni Twitter Feed and Blog is ‘written’ by a lesser-known relative of our award-winning mascot YoUDee. It’s basically me w/a mask on and it’s certainly is appropriate for the sophomoric, insouciant style of both the blog and the twitter feed.

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