New Twitter List Feature
This is a transcript for this segment of Episode 311 of my Beyond Social Media Show podcast, as well as the screencast demonstration that follows.
David Erickson: From a Social Media Today article by Andrew Hutchinson, who reports the Twitter is now allowing you to edit the banner photo for your Twitter lists. I have a bunch of–I’ve created a ton of Twitter lists
BL Ochman: Me too.
David Erickson: And I have like one for industries and prospective clients; you know, I just use them for all kinds of different things.
Add Your Own Banner Photo To Twitter Lists
David Erickson: But now you can add a photo, a banner photo at the top of the Twitter list. You can edit that and upload your own photo, which is really cool. What happens, then, is they used to have just these default photos or images. But now you can add, you know, like branded images, if you want to.
Do Custom Banner Photos Make Lists More Shareable?
David Erickson: But then when people share your list, it makes it more appealing, obviously with a good, nice, image. Which would encourage people to share it, I would think. But when you share it, Twitter will display in the Share, the custom banner; it also displays the number of list members and the list owner for the Twitter list.
So I’ve started to…I did it. I’ll put a How To Do thing in the show notes. But I did it with an Advertising Experts list that I have. I’m going to unlock–most of my lists are private, I mean a lot.
BL Ochman: Mine too.
David Erickson: I’m going to start unlocking them.
How To Edit Your Twitter List Cover Photo Screencast
David Erickson: Okay, so now I am going to show you how to add a custom photo to one of your Twitter lists. You can see I am logged into the e-Strategy Twitter account and I’m going to Lists here and here are all my Lists. I’ve built a ton of them. I’m going to go down to Communication Pros, and we’ll use that for this demonstration.
Twitter List Edit Features Now Includes Upload Image
David Erickson: So I opened up Communication Pros. And as you can see, there’s an Edit List. And within that, you can edit the title; you can edit the description; you can make it private; you can manage your members. But most significantly new to this is you can add a cover photo. So you can see that when I hover over the icon for the camera, it hovers so that shows me that I can edit it.
Twitter List Banner Dimensions
David Erickson: And I’ve already created a Strategic Communications Pros banner for this. Now you’ll see that it fits perfectly in here; that’s because I’ve edited it to the recommended 1500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall dimensions. I’ve added a title for this and branded with e-Strategy.
Crop Twitter List Image & Thumbnail
David Erickson: Now if I move, you can crop it but if I move it you see, you know. I’ve made it perfectly 1500 by 500, which is the dimensions you’re supposed to use, but if you don’t and you just want an upload a photo, you can use this to to crop the photo to your liking. But that fits perfectly so I’m going to apply that and Crop Thumbnail. Okay, now this I hadn’t anticipated, but I’m gonna do that right there. I’ll have Pros in the thumbnail there, and my e-Strategy branding there. So click, click apply there. And that’s done. And it’s as simple as that. Now you can see how it looks there.
How Twitter Lists Look When Tweeted
David Erickson: And I’m going to now go into a different account, go into my David Erickson account and find that, and share that List. So now that I’m logged into my David Erickson account, I’m going to go as e-Strategy and go to Lists here and find my Communication Pros list. Where is it? Oh, that’s my lists. I want e-Strategy’s lists. Okay. Where do I find their lists? See lists. There we go. And there’s Communications Pros. You can see that thumbnail shows up the way I wanted it to–clicking on that. And there’s the banner and I can follow this. I might as well follow my own list.
But I also want to see what it looks like when I tweet it. So I can block. I don’t want those. There’s my–Copy Link, tweet this. Okay. And: “Strategic Communication Professionals to follow.” And I’ll tweet that. And then let’s go back to my profile and see what that looks like, what that tweet looks like when somebody tweets your List. There we go. So that’s what it looks like. It’s got the banner photo, it says what the name the list is, who the list creator is and how many members are on that list.
So there you go. Pretty easy.
More Twitter Goodness
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