Up Close With Twitter’s New Header Photos For Profiles

In case you missed the big announcement on the Today Show yesterday morning, Twitter has updated profiles with a new Timeline-like header photo that will appear across platforms, transitioning the social channel to become more visual and image-centric.

How To Update Your Twitter Profile Header

There isn’t an obvious “update” on your profile, though, you’ll need to go into your account settings and make these changes yourself (take it from someone who waited an hour to see if the roll out would “hit” my account.) To get the new look, you’ll need to log in, go to the gear icon in the top right hand corner, go into Settings, and then Design. Scroll down below the existing palettes to “Customize Your Own.” Here you will see options to Change Header. The minimum dimensions are 1252×626 pixels and the file can’t be any larger than 5 MB.

When you upload the image, you will get a preview where you can click and drag the image around to your liking, very much like Facebook’s Timeline photo feature. You can also zoom in and zoom out. When you’re ready, hit Save and you’re done. At this point, you can remove the header photo at any time – your profile will just go back to the way it was before.

For our @marketingland account, we kept it simple and placed an image we had shared in the past. Our plan is to treat it a lot like our Facebook Timeline, switch it out with interesting or timely photos that reflect what we are talking about.

Twitter Headers, Just “Blah?”

Despite the unveiling on national TV, making the profile change didn’t seem like an urgent thing to do on the first day of roll out for many branded accounts. At the time of posting this post, some of my favorite brands I follow socially haven’t yet updated their profiles, including The New England Patriots, CNET, ModCloth, Dunkin Donuts. So I turned to media companies who may have followed The Today Show’s example – NBC News and CBS This Morning updated their profiles, but many others haven’t yet, including ABC, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The LA Times, even Mashable.

Coincidentally, even some of the comments online yesterday were less enthusiastic about the changes. Brent Csutoras of Kairay Media posted on Facebook, “Ok.. played with the new Twitter profiles a bit, and well… blah. A year plus in the making for that?” Rob Woods, Marketing Manager for Reinvent said, “If they want to improve the web interface let me schedule tweets from there or be logged into multiple accounts at once. Plus who uses the web interface anyway?”

What’s your take? Will these updated Twitter profile pages really make an impact? The profile headers seem like a nice feature on the updated iPad app, the changes have certainly put mobile first. But are there features you would have rather seen implemented? Leave your comments below.

About The Author

Monica Wright

Monica Wright serves as Vice President of Audience Engagement for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. With over 15 years of experience in online publishing, content marketing and audience development for media companies, she is focused on content consumption and measuring user engagement on both sites across multiple platforms including desktop, mobile, social and email. In addition, she serves as a program coordinator for the SMX conference series, produced by parent company Third Door Media, publisher of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. You can find Monica on Twitter @monicawright, LinkedIn and Google+.