We all know that the Super Bowl is the Super Bowl of, well, Super Bowls.  It’s even MORE super for mega-brands with colossal marketing budgets, fancy Hollywood contacts and burping frogs.  But not everyone is a Coke… Or even a Pepsi.  Consequently, if you’re a mid-sized business looking to maximize your advertising dollars this Sunday, the place to spend that cash isn’t on TV, but online.

Say you’re Shasta.  Or Thrifty Car Rental.  Or Kettle Brand.  Sure you have an ad budget, but at $3.8 million per 30 second TV spot, those dollars are burned in a half-minute.

But social media is different.  There’s a lower financial barrier to entry and seemingly endless opportunities to improve your “bang for the buck.”  So rather than blow your budget on 30 seconds, small businesses and mid-sized concerns should stretch their Benjamins across Twitter and Facebook.

As Portent’s President Steve Gahler says, “You can’t own the Super Bowl, but you can own the space where everyone talks about the Super Bowl.”

Here’s how you, too, can put some points on the board during the biggest media marketing event of the year.

The Game Day audience

Last year, 111.3 million people watched the Super Bowl – the largest audience ever.

And according to NBC (last year’s broadcaster), 2.1 million people watched the game live online.  Yes, a much (much) smaller market, but potentially a more tech-savvy, higher-income one as well.  Add that number to the masses following the game on social media and you have a nice chunk of engaged fans to market to.

This year’s broadcaster CBS will be streaming live on their site, as will nfl.com.

TV ad costs

Up, up and away:

According to Forbes:  “Current reports plug [Super Bowl XLII’s] ad price at $3.8 million, up from the $3.5 million that companies paid for a spot at [last] year’s game, and that is just the cost of air time. Ad budgets for Super Bowl commercials can run as high as $5 million per 30-second spot.”

So, potentially $8.8 million for 30 seconds.  Yes, it’s the biggest media event in the world, but…

Super Bowl ads don’t work for everyone

According to NBC News:  “Most of the top 10 [Super Bowl] spenders are perennial also-rans. Yum! Brands, owner of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, spent $67 million over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, the indisputable market leader, spent less than half that amount and is not a top 10 spender. Similarly, E*Trade, well-known for the talking baby campaign, spent more than any other online brokerage firm, yet remains fourth in the industry.”

Most mid- to-small-size companies can’t afford to blow $9 million on a spot that doesn’t guarantee a great ROI.  And for all their hype, Super Bowl ads don’t.  For example, check out this graphic from nfl.com’s Football Freakonomics:

Social media and television: Partners in engagement

According to the latest Nielsen Social Media Report, “As of June 2012, more than 33 percent of Twitter users had actively tweeted about TV-related content. Some 44 percent of U.S. tablet owners and 38 percent of U.S. smartphone owners use their devices daily to access social media while watching television.”

And those numbers are an aggregation.  Super Bowl engagement is even higher.

But does social really convert?

Even the NFL is using social media to evaluate Super Bowl ads’ ROI.  The NFL’s Head of Sales Seth Winter says social media improves an ad’s TV value, allowing them to charge more.  So why not start with social if you can’t afford the TV kit and caboodle?

Where to spend your money: Twitter

In the final moments of last year’s game, Twitter interaction was averaging over 12,000 tweets per second.  PER SECOND.  And the grand total for Super Bowl related tweets?  13.7 million.

From Zander Lurie, SVP, Strategic Development at CBS:

They refer to it as a “second screen” experience: the audience watches conventional media while using new media to comment on / interact with it.  Take a look at this graphic by Nielsen:

And for social proof, do you know who’s monitoring Twitter on Super Bowl Sunday?  All of those enormous in-game advertisers… For real time feedback, they turn to the social media network.

(Interesting aside: With social media, you may not even lose an impression due to a pit stop: according to the Nielsen report, 32% of people use social networking in the bathroom.)

Option 1: Promoted Tweets

A tip from Twitter’s advertising department: “Leverage real-time intent: Run Promoted Tweets in search to target relevant [timely] terms that have trended in the past on Twitter and are likely to once again spark high levels of discussion.”

A Promoted Tweet looks like this:

I could obviously do with some more followers… Hint.

And just in time to collect your Super Bowl dollars, Twitter made improvements to Promoted Tweets:  You can now target negative keywords.  Their example: “If you sell bacon, you can now keep your campaigns more than six degrees apart from Kevin Bacon by using ‘Kevin’ as a negative keyword.”

You can also target your promoted Tweets to geographic regions (a great advertising option for brick and mortar businesses), existing follower base and gender.

But the best thing about Promoted Tweets?  You only pay when people play.  From Twitter: “Promoted Tweets are priced on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis, so you only pay when someone retweets, replies to, clicks or favorites your Promoted Tweet.”  Pretty sweet deal for someone with a small ad budget.

Option 2: Sponsored hashtags

Also known as Promoted Trends, a sponsored hashtag will appear at the top of Twitter’s Trending Topics list at the left of a user’s feed.

Anecdotal evidence of their efficacy – at least for bigger brands – is positive.  For example, Coke used a promoted tweet during the 2010 World Cup and snatched 86 million impressions with a 6% engagement rate.

Today, the price tag of a 24-hour sponsored hashtag is around $120,000, though Twitter is expected to hike that cost for this year’s Bowl.  It’s a bargain at even twice or three times that figure, however, when you consider that your brand will stay in the spotlight for 24 hours (compared to a 30 second, $3.8 million TV spot).

Sponsored hashtags also appear on iPhones, Android mobile devices, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, making them a good choice for folks tweeting in front of their flatscreens.

A caveat: As with any social or viral marketing campaign, you do not control the interaction.  It is important to consider that the hashtag, once created, takes on a life of its own.  Some of your feedback may be negative. For example, check out the Republican National Committee’s #AreYouBetterOff debacle.

And for those of you truly looking for a bargain, you can get ahead of the game and capitalize on tags that you KNOW will be trending; in 2013, #ManofSteel, #IronMan3 and #Hangover3 are all pretty safe bets.  You can also check out hashtag search engines like Tweet Archivist or Tweet Charts to see what people are talking about most.

Option 3: Promoted accounts

While a promoted account won’t necessarily be visible on everyone’s Twitter page, it allows for greater targeting of potential customers. Twitter’s algorithm recommends a user follow your account only if they fit a specific profile, resulting in less wasted coverage.

Like Promoted Tweets, you only pay for interaction – specifically when someone follows your account. You decide how much you want to spend per day or new follower, and you can geo-target.

Our in-house social media guru Doug Antkowiak also suggests: “Promoted accounts target people based on who the target account is already following.  If you want to be seen by a specific niche, you need to go follow those people first.  Followerwonk is a great place to start.”

Where to spend your money: Facebook

Are people really looking at their Facebook pages during the big game?

Allfacebook.com studied the wall posts of more than 1,400 brands during game time and found that engagement during the Super Bowl soared 60%.

Not unexpectedly, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg maintains advertising on Facebook is better than advertising on television.  More unexpectedly, she had this stat to back it up:  Facebook’s daily traffic is over three times greater than Super Bowl viewership.

Option 1: Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads allow you to select a page or piece of content you’d like to promote.

Facebook has greater targeting dexterity than Twitter, allowing you to select from a number of demographic categories, including location, age, gender and interests.  You set your campaign budget and are charged every time someone sees your ad or sponsored story.  Then choose whether you’d like to optimize for engagement, impressions or clicks.

If a mid-sized business elects to go with Facebook Ads, it may want to create some pieces of quality Super Bowl-centric content to promote on Game Day.  Craft the message for your target market and select the demographic filters that correspond.

Option 2: Facebook Apps

More expensive but great at brand building, Facebook apps allow you to more fully engage with a potential customer base, often via a contest, game or service.  It also enables an advertiser to control a corner of the social media juggernaut, increasing user engagement rates.

With highlights like automatic bookmarking, newsfeed stories and a notifications API, Facebook apps are front and center for engaging potential customers.  Once you reach 10 active users, your app will be automatically included in the Facebook search index.  Facebook Insights also allows you to accurately track user engagement and referral traffic.

In fact this year, Doritos is using a Facebook App to choose their network Super Bowl commercial as the latest incarnation of their popular “Crash the Super Bowl” promotion.

While posting your app to Facebook is free, building it can cost anywhere from $500 to tens of thousands of dollars.

Your Game Day playbook

1. Start with content.  Create something relevant to the Super Bowl, but not necessarily about football.  Think of your target market and generate a campaign that connects your product or service to the event in a way that engages them.  For a conventional media example, the Puppy Bowl entertains Animal Planet’s demographic (pet owners) with a silly, cute ‘game’ that is relevant enough to capitalize on the Super Bowl’s PR, but distant enough they can carve their own niche.
2. Capitalize on Twitter trends through promoted tweets and sponsored hashtags.  Also take advantage of some ‘free’ promotion with Tweets using hashtags that are certain to be popular.
3. Anything that is cost-per-whatever, consider using.  You’re only paying for people who have seen your Facebook ad/Promoted tweet/account/etc.  No wasted coverage.
4. As always, monitor and measure.  Improve.  You’ll have another shot next year.

The takeaway

“Playing your own game” is about forging a relationship with your customer base on your terms.  Small- to mid-sized businesses should grasp the opportunity to capitalize on a trending, water cooler topic like the Super Bowl, but they must do so strategically, for the right price, and be able to measure the result.

For anyone who’s not Coke (or even Pepsi), the smart money’s online.  There you’ll have time to build a brand identity… One that stands a chance against a talking gecko and some Clydesdales.

Ultimately, you can spend $3.8 million on 30 seconds of TV which may or may not catch fire… Or you can become part of the excited, week-long dialogue that surrounds the big game, engaging potential consumers on a topic they are already vested in.

Now it may be too late to implement a strategy for the Super Bowl – it IS on Sunday – but there’s still a little time to capitalize on the Female Super Bowl: the Oscars air on Sunday, Feb. 24.

Am I missing any other viable social media ad outlets for Super Bowl Sunday?  Should we bet on YouTube?  Pinterest? (Hint: not them.)  Let me know in the comments below.

What’s New About Business Pages?

Not a lot, which is a good thing because sometimes it’s tricky to implement social media advice. Basically, business pages make three major changes on Pinterest:

1. Website Verification

Pinterest will add this nifty checkmark to your profile to verify that you own the site. Verification will most likely impact search results in Pinterest, making your brand easier to find.

2. New Buttons

Adding to the Pin It button, Pinterest now offers a Follow Button that will allow users to follow your account. Go ahead and try it: Portent, Inc.

Pinterest also unveiled a Profile Widget and a Board Widget that displays 30 of your latest pins in an iframe that links to your business page.

3. Access to New Features

Pinterest is a little vague about what these features are, but my guess is that Pinterest analytics must be right around the corner. In the mean time, I highly recommend pingraphy for scheduling and tracking pins.

How Do We Sign Up For a Business Page?

If you already have a Pinterest account, it’s not too difficult to create a business page by verifying your website. Here’s a quick walkthrough:

Log into your profile and visit Pinterest’s business page. If you don’t have a page yet, you can now join Pinterest as a business.

To finalize the process, you’ll need to verify your website, which you can do by downloading a Pinterest verification file and uploading it to your site’s server.

Uploading the Verification File

For many of us, this is where we hit the wall for our knowledge of the Internet. To upload the file, you’ll need FTP access for your website. Since some server setups are complicated (especially for those of us that don’t know what we’re doing), make sure that you’re in the right folder when you upload.

You’re looking for the docroot – it should be browsable at your domain without any subfolders (www.yourdomain.com/pinterest-file.html). Most hosting companies use “httpdocs” but it might also say “wwwroot” or some other variation.

Once the file is uploaded, check for the file in your browser. In our case, http://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/pinterest-b107e.html. It should look like this:

If all went well, visit the verification page again and click to complete the process.

If you have any trouble converting your Pinterest Business page, don’t be shy. Leave a comment or send @Portent or me (@SocialDoug) a tweet and we’ll get back to you.

The election was supposed to be close. Regardless of your party affiliation, you heard that for months: Maybe an electoral tie. Certainly with one candidate winning the electoral college and the other the popular vote. We wouldn’t know for days after November 6th…

Oops. The slide presentation/mini e-book below explains what I think happened: Polling companies missed an entire demographic group. At the same time: If the GOP wants to get back in the fight in 2016, they need to take a serious look at their social media strategy. That could hold the key to cracking their universe problem.

Disclaimer: I am a pinko lefty liberal. But that didn’t affect my research. You can see how hard I’ve been on the Democrats in past years for their social and internet marketing gaffes: Here, here and here. And either side can use or ignore this info.

Most important: Whichever party you’re from, please don’t post political yelling, screaming, taunting or caterwauling below. I’ll delete it. Stick to the report, and what you’d add, change or delete.

This year’s presidential race continues to be a great marketing study: The niche brand with a universe problem versus the hesitant big brand. After the debate last week, both candidates had a huge burst of support on Facebook. Both President Obama and Governor Romney’s Facebook fan growth rate grew by 2x or more.

After that the data gets preeeetttty interesting:

Did the Obama campaign spam Facebook?

Someone check my numbers here, because I’d swear the Facebook data shows the Obama campaign adding 1.2 million fans on Facebook in a single day (10/8/12):

The Obama campaign added 1.2 million Facebook fans in one day.

I looked everywhere for an explanation, but couldn’t find any.

That naturally got me thinking “Spam.” Either a member of the Obama Campaign did a happy dance on Amazon Mechanical Turk and bought a ridiculous quantity of followers all at once, or an Obama opponent decided to see if she could blast his Facebook profile into being locked down. Dunno.

Looking at shares/fan, though, we didn’t find a huge drop. You’d expect 1.2 million new, worthless followers would pull down the average shares per follower. Not so here:

Barack Obama’s shares per fan didn’t fall, in spite of adding 1.2 million fans in a single day.

Sooo, either someone tried to spam and accidentally acquired a slew of fantastic, interested fans, or something huge happened 10/8/12 that I completely missed. Anyone?

The polling gap closes

Mitt Romney saw a huge rise in Facebook fan growth rate, too, but he saw it immediately following the debate:

Mitt Romney saw immediate improvement in his Facebook growth rate after the 10/3 debate.

That corresponds to his sudden rise in the polls.

What’s it all mean? His debate performance cracked the shell on his universe problem. He got in front of a lot more people, and appealed to them. The result was both Facebook growth and a rise in the polls.

Note: I’m not saying one caused the other. Just that they correspond. The interesting part of the data, to me, is how intertwined Facebook and polling data is this year.

What’s next

The Obama campaign saw their huge growth on 10/8. That corresponds to a fall in Governor Romney’s growth rate:

When Barack Obama had his huge surge in audience growth, Mitt Romney’s growth rate fell.

We’re still testing this theory, and it’s hard to tell if the one-day, 1.2 million fan surge is an anomaly or not. The model we’re building suggests another Obama surge in the polls is coming, but we’ll see. Some polls show Romney in the lead at this point. Others show Obama in the lead and pulling away again. Others indicate an increased chance that Elvis may enter the race. More on that as the data emerges.

Niche brand versus big brand

In our first report, we pointed out that the Romney campaign has a universe problem, while the Obama campaign faces the listlessness and inertia of any big brand. The first debate reinforced that. For whatever reason, the President looked, well, listless. He was extremely restrained, rarely responding to jabs from Governor Romney. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, came out on the attack, pushing hard to make his views known. That seems to have expanded his universe, as polling numbers quickly tilted in his favor:

That’s the danger of a conservative communications strategy, whether you’re a presidential candidate or a corporation. The Obama campaign has left the door open for Mitt Romney. Governor Romney’s breakout performance at the last debate moved him into a virtual tie with the President.

In social media and traditional media, this race is shaping up to be a contest between a contender with a small audience who needs a larger one, and an incumbent with a huge fan base that he can’t keep inspired: The niche brand that’s trying to break out, and the major brand that needs a wakeup call.

Debates are notorious for short-term bounce and long-term irrelevance. Will it stick? We’ll see. But the lesson for the Obama camp—and marketers— is pretty clear: If you play not to lose, you’ll probably do just that.

Tomorrow, I’ll analyze what the candidates said over the past week and audience response to their messages/styles.

Along with a bunch of little changes, there are a few major ones: The redesign itself, cover images, and the fact that company pages are now visible through the LinkedIn mobile and iPad apps.

These hip new LinkedIn company pages are sort of like when smarty-pants Steve Urkel transformed into Stefan Urquelle thanks to his “Cool Juice” DNA serum on “Family Matters.” Still smart, but way smoother.

All this means that now is a great time to optimize your company page, whether you’ve just created a page or you’re giving your page a check-up. Let’s jump in.

Step 1: Optimize the basics

Start here if you haven’t already filled out the basic information on your business page. Click “Edit” in the upper-right.

You’ll then see the below fields: Company Type, Company Size, Company Website URL, Main Company Industry, Company Operating Status, and Year Founded. Make sure these are filled out as accurately as possible to give people the best sense of your business.

Next, look just below all those fields and you’ll find “Company Locations.” For local SEO purposes, make sure you’re entering the address of your business the same way across the Internet. If you have more than one location, click “Add another location.”

Now scroll to the bottom of the page. Add a company description that’s at least a couple of sentences long and then add some of your company’s specialties.

Step 2: Optimize logos and the new cover image

• Cover Image (646 x 200): Your cover image should represent your brand. For now, we’re just using our Facebook cover photo. If you’re worried about uploading an image larger than 646 x 200, rest assured that you can crop your image after uploading.

• Standard Logo (60 x 60): The standard logo appears at the top of your company page. LinkedIn will lay the square logo you upload over a white rectangle, so we recommend using a logo that already has a white background so they match up. Otherwise, your logo will have an awkward cutoff like the example below from Mashable.

• Square Logo (50 x 50): The square logo is used in network updates. For example, when someone sees a status update in their feed from your business. Keep the square logo consistent with your standard logo.

Step 3: Add designated page admins

Adding company page admins makes it easier to keep your page updated. Of course, some type of a social media manager should have admin access along with possibly a designer and copywriter. To add them, just start typing their name and then click. If the person you’re looking for doesn’t show up, it’s likely because you aren’t connected to them yet.

Step 4: Post updates and target audiences

Try posting updates daily to keep people up-to-date with your company, or at least the industry your company is involved in. Here at Portent, we make it a habit to update our LinkedIn page with blog posts and events like our monthly webinars.

When posting an update, make sure the image doesn’t look like crap. If it does, uncheck “Include photo.” If you want to see statistics about your individual posts, they’re now sitting just below the image. You also now have the ability to keep a post at the top of all your updates. Just click “Feature this update.”

Target Audiences

Moreover, you’ll probably notice that the targeting feature is more visible.

For instance, if you’re posting an update you think only small business employees would find interesting, then specify a target audience using company size. Then check “1-10 employees” and “11-50 employees.” When your update is posted, only followers who work for companies of that size will see the update. Other categories include industry, function, seniority, and geography.

Step 5: Add job listings

Is your company hiring? When you’re in “Edit,” click the tab “Careers” and then select “Post a job.”

Posting jobs on LinkedIn isn’t free, but it can be useful to post openings on a website where so many professionals reside. Below is an example of one of our job postings on LinkedIn to give you an idea of how these can be organized.

Step 6: Add products and services

Setting up your “Products” page and adding products or services can be the most time consuming part of optimizing your company’s new LinkedIn page.

The “Products” page (shown below) can be edited to include a description of what your company offers, up to three custom 640 x 220 banner images, a YouTube video, and audience targeting. To find all of this, go to “Edit” and then select the “Services” tab.

Add Products and Services

Once you’ve finished setting up the main “Products” page, you’ll be ready to add products and services (up to 25!). For an idea of the types of products and services you can promote on your company page, we list Search Engine Optimization, our PPC Essentials Program, Social Media Marketing, Copywriting, and more.

To get started, hover over the arrow next to the “Edit” button on your company page and click “Add product or service.”

Give potential customers the best idea about your product or service by being thorough when filling out each field. Don’t forget to:

• Include a URL for the product or service that points back to your company’s website (Step 7).
• List an employee as a contact from your company. Type their name below Step 8 to select them.
• Do you have a special offer for this specific product or service? Go to Step 9 and include the details.
• Do you have YouTube video you’d like to include? Fill out both Step 10 and Step 11.

When finished, click “Publish.”

Step 7: Measure your page’s success with Insights

If you’re not measuring how your page is doing, then you’re doing internet marketing wrong. For your company page, LinkedIn Insights makes this easy.

Follower Insights

Click “Follower Insights” and you’ll be taken to the page below. It keeps track of things like:

• Company Update Engagement: How followers are interacting with your company’s updates, broken down into clicks, likes, comments, shares, and engagement percentage.
• Follower Demographics: What industries do your followers work in? What’s the follower breakdown between non-employees and employees? Find out here.
• Company Update Impressions: See how many impressions your updates have made month-by-month.

Page Insights

On the other hand, “Page Insights” keeps tabs on things like page views, page visitor demographics, unique visitors, and products and services page clicks. Like “Follower Insights,” all of these can be broken down into several sub-categories.

How do you feel about the changes LinkedIn made to company pages? Leave a comment or question.

You can’t even tell that, as the camera came on, I was whispering “don’t say um or like don’t say um or like don’t say um or like.”

You can see our report on the topic in this blog post.

And a huge shoutout to KOMO for giving us the video!!!

Update: You can watch the video of my interview, now, in this blog post.

My KOMO TV appearance 10/3 was a bit of surprise, and our research wasn’t written up as prettily as I’d like. Still, I figured some folks might want to see more information than I can communicate in a 3-minute TV segment. Here’s the report so far:

I will be updating it over the next few weeks. Subscribe if you’d like the latest!

Images from Wikipedia (minus the speech bubbles)

I’m going to be on KOMO 4 News Primetime tonight, speaking in a 3-minute segment about social media’s growth and influence in this year’s Presidential race. We’ve been researching Facebook/Twitter interactions and the election for about 5 months—I’ll be talking about our findings so far.

The highlights:

• This is the first Presidential election where social media reflects and affects the outcome for both sides.
• The Romney campaign suffers from a ‘universe problem’ as reflected in their Facebook data: Romney has a highly motivated core audience but can’t expand beyond it. That’s a symptom of the problems that have him losing ground in battleground states like Colorado.
• The Obama campaign suffers from big-brand problems: He has a Facebook audience larger than the population of Texas (!!!!) and therefore is very cautious about what he says/does there. But that makes it hard for him to put the election away, at least on Facebook.
• This is marketing – each candidate has a brand. Each campaign is trying to strengthen their brand and get you to vote for them. Social media’s a part of that now.

The show airs (live) at 9 PM. You can watch it here.

I’ll be posting more of the research and data this evening and tomorrow.

I’d be lying if I said I was totally relaxed and felt like I was born to be on TV (cough). But I’ll rely on the great folks at KOMO to help me out.

[ Ian Lurie on KOMO 4 News Primetime, 9 PM (approximately) 10/3/2012 ]

This update affects both Twitter’s web client and their mobile app, which was a surprise to many brands. Read on for best practices regarding the new Twitter headers, and the new mobile app.

New Twitter Headers

The basic navigation remains the same: clicking the tabs in the left-hand column (Tweets, Following, Followers, Favorites, Lists) keeps users on your profile. So, if someone comes to my profile and wants to see who I’m following, that list will display below the new header section.

Header Setup, Dimensions & Tips

Uploading your new header image is simple:

1. Prepare an image. Bigger is better as long as you don’t exceed 1252 x 626 (the optimal viewing size across all devices). Remember, your bio and other information will display over the top of the image. So pick something that’ll keep that text readable. Anything smaller than 700 or so pixels wide looks like a game of Minecraft, though.
2. Log into your Twitter account.
3. Head to “Settings” from the drop-down menu in the top right of the Twitter menu bar. From here, select “Design” as if you were going to change your profile’s theme or background image. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the new header image option.
   
4. You won’t need to spend a lot of time editing the size of the image you want to use. After you choose an image, Twitter lets you customize how you want to display the image. This is why I recommend choosing a large image to upload, as you can easily zoom in and out to get the right look.
   

And, since it always helps to have the actual dimensions: In the web client, the header image itself is 520 x 260.

Some other tips:

• From my tests, it seems that Twitter darkens the header image. Beware of this if you’re uploading a dark image. If you don’t like the finished product on your profile, try brightening the photo slightly and re-uploading.
• Keep the image simple. It will compete with your profile photo and bio for attention.
• As of right now, there appears to be no way to change the text color in the header section. The default is white, so you’ll probably want to upload an image without a lot of bright colors to avoid clashing.
• Remember, if your header image doesn’t go well with your background image or theme, everything is customizable. You may want to worry more about making your header section aesthetically pleasing since it’s home to your bio and is front and center on the new profile layout.

Some Twitter Header Inspiration

If you look hard enough, some people and brands have already updated their profiles. Here are some early favorites.

Etsy

Jeff Elder

NME

Setting the header via Twitter Mobile

In addition to the big changes for the web-based version, Twitter released an update to its mobile app – version 5.0 for iOS and version 3.4 for Android. If you’d like to setup your header image via the app, here’s how:

1. Navigate to the “Me” section of the app, tap the gear symbol and then select “Edit profile.” Choose “Header.”
   
2. You can take a photo for your new header image or choose an image that’s already stored on your phone. If you choose an existing photo, you can zoom in or out before it’s uploaded.
   
3. Once you’re happy with your new header image, your mobile profile will look something like this. To see your bio, location and website, slide the header to the left.
   

Photo Stream

The other new feature on your mobile profile is a photo stream strip, located right below your last three tweets. Slide the photos to the left and you can browse all the photos a user has shared in their tweets.

We’ll play around with this and give you an update soon.

One quick note about the photo stream: As Android Police points out, the stream only includes images uploaded through Twitter or Instagram.

That covers the major changes I’ve seen so far.

What’s your take on the headers and redesigned profiles? Let me know in the comments.

We wanted to flip the tables on internet marketing this week and take a look at one of the limitations of Twitter from a user perspective.

You may not know this yet, but there is a limit to how many of your fellow tweeters you can follow. I found out the hard way.

As a writer, I am a good observer. So when I joined Twitter, I watched how other writers handled their accounts. Writers follow (and are followed by) each other in droves. Some paranormal e-book authors follow 60,000 or more people. I began aggressively following other writers and literati thinking there was no limit to the inspiration available.

I was wrong.

“ Twitter limits following behavior [because] these limits help us improve site performance and reliability and help us make Twitter a nice place for everyone.” —Twitter

Aggressive is a bad word for Twitter. They use the word 4 times (out of 456 words) on their Following Rules and Best Practices Page. And never in a good way.

But when I say I follow other writers aggressively, I mean actively. I’ve sought out people with shared interests. A lot of them. Since June, I’ve followed 2,000 people I wanted to learn more about. And therein lies the problem. Twitter says I can’t follow anyone else until I have more followers. Here’s why that doesn’t make Twitter a nicer place for me.

I believe in the limits of my own importance

Being merely one human out of nearly 7,000,000,000 on this planet, I expect to notice more people than notice me. I think it’s weird when people have nearly the same number of followers as following—as if they are in a followback loop where they only want to know about people who like them first.

I currently follow three times as many people as follow me. I don’t think that’s because I’m boring. It’s because I like listening more than talking. Plus my following list covers many different topics and those tweeps may not share my interests.

Here’s who I follow and why:

• Marketers like SEO Chicks give me tips to do my day job better. Foreign marketers like Why Not Blue refresh my language skills while teaching me about SEO Montreal-style.
• A Dangerous Business and other travel bloggers fuel my dreams of someday using those language skills again.
• I learn about the publishing industry from agents, publishers, reviewers, and lit zines. I like being reminded of the people behind the good work at places like Melville House and Dalkey Archive.
• Other writers share my struggles and triumphs. Tweeting to Sarah Martinez about how much I enjoyed her book launch is a “thanks for the invite” and good promo for her.
• Visual artists and musicians offer different looks at creativity. BOMB Magazine posts archive interviews that hit all the right notes.
• Popular blogs like Huffington Post make sure I’m not totally clueless on the happenings of the world.
• Washington State DOT, Seattle Police, and local media give me the news I need right now.
• My friends and I support and promote each other in Twitter and real life. Ann Hedreen, Liza Wolff-Francis, Icess Fernandez, and Kim Brown all keep me grounded.

Most of those people will never follow me back. I don’t expect them to. But to get to follower/following parity which Twitter seems to want, I need a wide variety of strangers to follow me that I don’t plan to follow back. That just isn’t me…

I believe in community

I follow back. Not indiscriminately, but if you want to take time to get to know me, I’d like to get to know you too. We can do that on Facebook, but unfortunately you’ll have to make the first move on Twitter (and wait until I hit some magical unpublished ratio—PR and the Social Web says the magic formula is number of followers plus 10%—that means I can follow you back).

Although our day to day importance in each other’s lives may be small, I’m still glad to connect. The world is a lonely place without connections.

I believe in serendipity

Twitter is like Penn Station at rush hour. Somewhere in the cacophony is a voice telling an interesting story (a lot of them really), and I believe that Fate (and a little judgment on my part) will point me in the direction of the information and inspiration I crave. These “random” interactions prevent creative stagnation.

I believe in you

I don’t dump people I follow without good reason. Three or four tweets about how no one likes you or how you are the only important person in the word will get you dumped. And I block spammers. But mostly you’ll find me a pretty open and generous audience. Which means it’s nearly impossible to winnow down my following list so I can follow new people.

What do I do now?

Can I get around this follower limit? Yes. I could start dumping people I don’t LOVE (but I won’t). Or I could build lists of people I am interested in but don’t follow and then set up a stream in HootSuite, but why should I have to? Why should it be so difficult?

”If you’ve reached the account-based follow limit (2,000 users), you’ll need to wait until you yourself have more followers before you can follow additional users.” —Twitter

I can accept that I have to sit out following for a while (not that I have any choice). But it annoys the crap out of me that I can’t take an active aggressive role in building my Twitter feed. So, Destiny…will I get more followers or is everything I need already in my feed?

Are you wildly inspired by too many tweeps? How do you handle your follower/following ratio?