Before you go changing anything around on your twitter profile to make it more professional you must decide what the purpose of the account is.

Is your purpose to connect with friends and family?
Is your purpose to share important updates to customers of your store or online business?
Is your purpose to attract potential clients and to give them an understanding of why they should choose your product or service?

If your purpose is only to connect with friends and family then you don’t really need to have a professional presence in my opinion.

But if your purpose is business related then the following steps will help you create a professional presence on twitter.

Sometimes people will have a personal and a business-related purpose for using twitter. In those cases I recommend having a personal twitter account and a separate business related account on twitter.

To create a professional presence on twitter you want to have your own unique background. The default background is used by millions of people and you want to set yourself apart.

There are many websites that will help you create a customized background for your twitter account. And the best part is that most of them are free.

To create a custom background for my twitter account I used Twitbacks.com.

Twitter allows you to have a small avatar picture associated with your account and I recommend using a personal photograph for this.

It doesn’t have to be a professional headshot where your hair and makeup is perfect; it just needs to be a picture of you.

This allows your followers to connect your tweets and messages with a real person. This personal touch adds credence to what you say.

I like to post my phone number on my twitter account for all of my followers to see. When followers see a phone number listed with a twitter account it gives them confidence that if they had a problem or question there is someone they could call.

I know some of you will be uncomfortable doing this and it’s completely understandable.

But if you run a small business or work in any line of sales then you really need to have your phone number listed on your twitter account.

To my knowledge twitter does not allow you to actually list the phone number as part of your account. But you can have it be part of your background.

In the example below you can see my phone number is on the far left side:

You will also want to list your e-mail address on your twitter account. Just as with phone numbers, you can’t actually list your e-mail on your account but you can include it as part of your background.

I know some of you will be concerned about posting your e-mail and receiving spam.

To deal with this I created a second e-mail address that I used specifically for my business. And this is the e-mail address that I post on my twitter account.

Luckily Gmail has a very good spam filter and so I actually get very few spam messages in my inbox each week.

People follow you for a reason. Whether it’s to hear about new products your store is offering or updates about the cause you represent, people are listening to what you say.

And the minute you deviate from that you will lose followers.

So before you post a tweet ask yourself, “Why are people following me? And is this new tweet something they want to hear about?”

If the answer is no or if you’re not sure then do not post the new tweet.

I will usually tweet something in the morning and then sometimes in the evening. 1 to 3 tweets today is optimal.

You want to your followers to see something from you each day but you don’t want to overdo it.
The last thing you want is for one of your followers to see that the last 20 tweets are all from you. When this happens to me I immediately unfollow the person.

A popular way to get followers is to follow a whole bunch of people and hope that many of them follow you back. This results in you having 3,000 followers and you are following 3,000 people yourself.

When people see this it looks less professional. They know there is no way you can be listening to what all 3000 people are tweeting about.

On the other hand it is much more impressive if you follow just a few people and yet have hundreds of followers yourself. When people see this they are more likely to follow you in my opinion here.