Twitter Background

0 comments

Posted on 23rd November 2009 by admin in twitter

, ,



You want to have a professional online presence with any important business, and a new background can really help people understand who you really are. Many social networks allow you to express your artistic creativity by allowing modification of their default theme, and Twitter is no different, they allow you to push the boundary of your talents. Your twitter background is a chance to express yourself and who you are, you want your background to stand out and set you apart, you want to take it to the next level. Making use of a custom-designed background will offer a lasting impression in a quick and productive way.

How to design your Twitter background

The information you should show is a company image unique to you that can transform you from ordinary to memorable.

You will want to include you’re:

1. Logo

2. Business name

3. Business website textual links

4. Business contact information

5. Business address info

6. A short bio

7. A photo of yourself

Image is everything, this will help you build your brand uniqueness, and re-enforce customer loyalty. If you’re planning on using twitter as a marketing tool, don’t include any tile on the image for a cleaner and professional look.

Imaging software

Using an image on your twitter site is a perfect opportunity to make a statement about yourself or your company and further your brand.

You can use imaging software such as Photoshop; a wonderful program that allows you to edit a photograph in as many ways as you can think of, or Paint Shop Pro which is a sophisticated, yet fairly easy-to-use picture editing program that’s far more reasonably priced than others in its category .

You need to create a large background image 1280×1024 that can occupy the computer screen but without tiling.

Tiling:

A.

When the image is bigger than the computer screen, everything is wonderful. On the other hand, if the image is smaller than the computer screen, copies of the image are arranged next to each other (“tiling”), so these smaller images need to join together satisfactorily in order for them to look nice.

Imaging software

Using an image on your twitter site is a perfect opportunity to make a statement about yourself or your company and further your brand.

You can use imaging software such as Photoshop; a wonderful program that allows you to edit a photograph in as many ways as you can think of, or Paint Shop Pro which is a sophisticated, yet fairly easy-to-use picture editing program that’s far more reasonably priced than others in its category .

Sidebar

Your sidebar can begins on the upper left-hand side of your image and can contain your name, job title specialty, social network URL, blog URL, and other important information like:

Photos Images Business info Website You can include more information about yourself in your background than twitter allows you to in your description like:

1.Personal information

2.You tube

3.Additional web site links

JPEG or GIF

Save you image as a JPEG (JPEG “Joint Photographic Experts Group” a commonly used method of squeezing big images into small spaces) or if you wish to have a faster loading image, save it as a GIF (GIF “Graphics Interchange Format – Picture Format” are compressed images, which reduces the amount of time it takes to transfer images over a network connection).

Login to your Twitter account, once you have saved your image and on the upper right:

A.Click on ‘Settings’

B.Click on the ‘Design’ tab

C.Click on the link ‘change background image

To fine the images you have created and stored on your computer clicking on ‘browse’.

Leave the tile check-box unchecked, to finish, click on ‘save changes’. After several seconds, you will have a custom Twitter background image.

Your personality is communicated through your Twitter background image. If you plan to use Twitter for the marketing of products or services over the Internet, make the background more professional as well as making sure that it go well with your image and personality.

Editing programs

Apart from Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro there are many editing programs that you can use, so select the software you are familiar with and will help you in creating the background image you are looking for.

By: Lloyd L Lewis

About the Author:
There are a few resources on the web to help you achieve your objective, if you are uncomfortable with producing your own image:

Free Twitter Designer – Personalize your Twitter background that have the same look and feel as those done by professional graphic designers – free and easy to use

Twitter Gallery – Fun and interesting background designs, not able to modify, free and ready to use

Twitter For Business Marketing: http://hubpages.com/hub/Twitter-How-To-Use-Twitter-For-Marketing



Caffeinated Content

Social Marketing Principle – Value Before Return

0 comments

Posted on 20th November 2009 by admin in social marketing

, ,



Learning the skills of social marketing is an important tool in your network marketing business. When you work for someone else, much of that is done for you. However, when you have your own network marketing business or any home based business for that matter, the challenge of meeting those social marketing needs will be all yours. Building your business with social marketing is more than just learning how to deal with people. It is a process of learning to offer value before expecting something in return.

Until recently, a traditional network marketing business was built by following leads, finding prospects, cold calling, doing follow up visits and pretty much anything else your upline suggested. Most home businesses are built much the same. For your business to succeed you need to have a source of contacts. Finding that source is extremely time consuming.

Unfortunately, even if you do everything right – even if you invest hours upon hours promoting your business, your prospects are probably half-hearted at best. The average person can – with a click – access information that includes the negative as well as the positive. Much of this information is opinion based and not necessarily reliable – making it even more difficult to reach your target audience. Like everything else, technology is pushing for a change in how you build your business.

Now, I’m not saying the old business model doesn’t work anymore – because I know people who are still doing just fine with it. I’m saying that time is at a premium in today’s world. Have you noticed that families are noticeably busier than they were, say – even 20 years ago? There is so much competition in every area of family life that the average family simply doesn’t have any time left. They do, however, still need that extra income.

The most common option is still – to set up a home based business. With no travel time, they have the distinct advantage of being able to stay home where they can invest a few hours here and there. But, those few hours rarely show enough profit to make a difference. And who wants to add yet one more thing to an already packed schedule with little to show for it?

Ideally, they need a way to leverage their time by setting up a business using Social Marketing. I first learned about Social Marketing when I enrolled in Renegade University where I began learning about things like blogs, articles, journals, video, bookmarking and social sites. Another thing that was impressed upon us over and over again was this statement: Offer value first – before expecting anything in return.

I drove by a flower market on the way home today. On the large billboard outside, they announced the random name of one person from our community. Every week there is a new name drawn. That person only needed to stop by the store to receive a free dozen roses: no purchase, no entry, no strings attached. What a marketing plan! Give value before expecting anything in return. Do you think any of those people ever return to purchase flowers?

My husband has a piano business. Many times he has offered valuable information to someone looking to purchase a piano or offered his expert opinion on whether or not to fix or restore a piano. Do they always return to buy from him? Not always. But, he knows that he has offered them honest value up front. They are then free to consider the information and draw their own conclusions. Again: value before return.

That is the principle taught at Renegade University. Always offer value before expecting anything in return. Building your business on the internet with Social Marketing offers so much more than just business tools. It will teach you to offer what people want – and how they want it.

By: Wendy Archambault

About the Author:
Wendy Archambault is an internet marketing coach, using social marketing principles to offer the most effective online training to network marketers and small business owners. Networkers who are still using the traditional methods of marketing experience even more challenges today – with information on the internet just a click away. Social marketing goes beyond traditional, using the internet to build a prospect list, generate leads and establish cash flow.



Website content

Tips For Developing Facebook Games

0 comments

Posted on 8th November 2009 by admin in facebook

, ,



The Facebook Platform has created a whole new market for online games and start ups such as the Social Games Network (SGN) and Zynga. I wrote about developing Facebook Applications a while ago as a overview of my experiences. Some of my apps are games and some are not – I’m a game developer so I prefer making games.

While going through my blog traffic data, I saw search terms specifically about developing games on Facebook. That leads me to believe that someone is looking for information about that. I have some of that knowledge to share!

I generally make games for Facebook using Flash and ActionScript. There really isn’t a good way to make really interactive games using web languages and Flash is fairly powerful for 2D casual game experiences. You can find a list of the Facebook games that I’ve made or had a hand in from my developing Facebook Applications article.

There are basically three real games on that list: FlipCup Challenge, Sam’s Solitaire, and Sheep Tycoon. Sheep Tycoon is by far the prettiest because there was a real artist on that project – the other two I just slapped some art together to get the game out quickly. I’m not really an artist.

Using Facebook API From Flash

Figuring out how to best make calls to the Facebook API from Flash was one of the first things we had to deal with. In Sheep Tycoon, the high score table shows up in the Flash part of the game opposed to FlipCup or Sam’s Solitaire where I just did it in PHP. There are a whole bunch of Flash Facebook API’s – I didn’t like any of them.

The solution we came up with is to make a 0×0 iframe – basically invisible – on the canvas page and load a PHP script that would do all the Facebook API calls. So, if we needed to add a new high score to our database, we would load the script in the invisible iframe. This works for sending notifications or doing any sort of Facebook API call.

Getting the Friends

Although I didn’t find doing this all that complicated, I did see a search term for it in my traffic data. The easiest way to accomplish this is to just get the user’s friend ID’s in PHP and then passing it into the game using flashvars. I don’t see many cases where the user’s friend list will change while the game is being played. Once you have the friend ID’s in the game you can do whatever you want with it. We used it to show the list of your friend’s high scores in Sheep Tycoon.

The game takes the friend ID’s from flashvars. When we need to get the high scores, we pass the same ID’s to our PHP script that does all the database work and then returns the data in XML form for Flash to read.

Dealing with High Scores

You can display the high scores inside the game or you can display as a PHP page. I will generally opt to do the latter because there are less steps involved. PHP will get the data and display the data while Flash has to call a PHP script to get the data and then display it. However, displaying the high scores as part of the game itself is a better experience.

The semi-tricky aspects with high scores is how to record them and assign global ranks to each player. I’ve used time as a tie-breaker for scores that are identical. If you got the score first, you will stay above the person who got the score second. MySQL has been our database of choice and you can use ORDER BY with more than one field so it would be: ORDER BY score, time.

In FlipCup Challenge, each user has a global rank that is determined by their high score. This rank changes as players get new high scores. Updating everyone’s global rank every time someone managed to get a new high score didn’t seem like a good idea.

Firstly, to calculate the global rank, I figured out the number of rows that had a score higher than the score we are looking to get a new rank for. With that information, we’ll know that the rank will be something lower than the row count. We then find all the scores that are the same as the score we are using and then determine where it fits in there. With those two pieces of information we can calculate the right rank.

In order to make sure the scores are correct when anyone goes to look at the Scoreboard in FlipCup, we also update the ranks of all your friends when your rank changes. Global ranks are also recalculated every time you view the Scoreboard page. This will ensure that all the global ranks will be correct when someone is viewing it.

I’m sure there are better ways for determining global ranks than this but, for FlipCup’s purposes, it works fine. The main objective was to make sure the pages loaded fast so the code had to do the work quickly.

Experiment

Game development on Facebook is still in infancy. I’m not aware of many sites dedicated to providing information about games and Facebook. The games themselves are still rather primitive as most don’t really tap into the potential of social networks. I believe social networks are a powerful tool that can help spread new games and game ideas.

I have not looked much into development on the “new” Facebook even though I have switched to it and my links above point to the new Facebook. My apps are still working fine so I am not too concerned. The marketing and growth of apps are going to be affected. The chance of a Zombies-esque app proliferating is very unlikely in this new environment.

I will continue to create games for Facebook and other social networks. There are some ideas I have floating around – some of which I am working on. Experimenting with different ideas is the best any of us can do as this is a new road to travel.

By: Tommy Leung

About the Author:



Caffeinated Content – Members-Only Content for WordPress