Much has been written about using Twitter for business, for social networking, for personal connections, for making money with and increasing follower count. But many people forget that without a good (great) Twitter bio, it’s virtually impossible to get targeted followers, much less engage meaningfully with them.

Now some may argue that writing an itty bit bio of a 160 characters is hardly rocket science and they’d be right. But the number of atrocious bios I’ve seen lately has inspired this post. It’s not always easy to combine brevity, meaning and interest.

Whether you use Twitter for business or other, take a good look at your Twitter bio and ask yourself “Will someone reading my bio want to follow me?” and if yes, then ask “Will that follower be the kind of person I wish to attract?”

No one relevant will follow you if they don’t know who you are. And no one will know who you are if you don’t tell them succinctly. Enter your Twitter bio.

Twitter Bio Don’ts

Now before we discuss what you SHOULD write in your bio, let’s get all the DON’T stuff out of the way first.

• Don’t copy paste a longer than 160 character bio from somewhere else. Bios that are cut off mid-sentence are sloppy, unprofessional and irritating.
• Don’t write something in the bio that has nothing to do with you. For example, a popular quote. Besides, it’s cheesy; be original.
• Don’t throw out a challenge. “Follow me if you dare.” Umm, no thanks, I’m not that daring.
• Don’t leave it blank. Self explanatory.
• Don’t use clichés, jargons or buzzwords. They make you sound fake, insincere and a possible spammer. Like all those self-proclaimed “social media gurus” out there.
• Don’t mix languages unless your audience understands both. It’s annoying enough when you start following someone whose username is in English but who tweets in another tongue!
• Don’t type like a teenager (unless you are one, but even then it’s a thinly veiled excuse). By that I mean ThE TwITTer bIoS ThAt LoOk lIkE ThIs (Gosh that hurt!)

Remember, the main point of your bio is so that others may determine if you are follow-worthy or not based upon your mutual interests. People like to follow others who:

1. Have similar interests
2. They can learn something from (I’m obviously not including news sources and celebs in his mix; just regular people)

Twitter Bio Content Ideas

So then, what should you put in your bio that will attract the right audience?

1. Your interests, obviously. Your interests could include your hobbies and stuff that you have experience in. Examples could be graphic designer, travel content specialist, wine connoisseur, or whatever else interests you.
2. What defines you. If someone asks you what do you do, what’s your reply? That’s the reply that goes here. In condensed form, of course. One of my replies is that I’m an online entrepreneur. Another one of my replies is that I’m a proud mom to a toddler. Figure out your priorities and what you want prospective followers to know about you. In my experience, a healthy balance of personal and professional elements in your bio adds interest to the dynamics that make you an individual.
3. Your areas of expertise. What are you truly great at? What do you consider yourself an expert in? Is it CAD, politics, humor, journalism?
4. What you are passionate about. This should go without saying, but often people write really weird stuff like “I’m passionate about making money online” as their Twitter bio. Who wouldn’t like to make money online, seriously! Find a real passion and write it here. Your passion could be helping others in a specific way, or buying a Porche, or taking care of cute kittens until they find a good home. Passions are driving factors and people gravitate towards others who follow the same passions.
5. Keywords. If you want to be found on Twitter search or by the numerous Twitter apps that group people by interest, then it’s vital that you have relevant keywords in your profile. If you are marketing locally, you could have your location plus your business type as part of your Twitter bio–e.g. “NYC’s go-to bakery for bagels.” That way search engines are more likely to find your Twitter profile when searching for the keywords “NYC bakery.”
6. Usefulness/USP (especially for companies). There’s an example that follows later in this post of a service called BackupYourTweets. They compelled me to follow them on the strength of their Twitter bio. Read below to find out how they’ve artfully combined the unique selling point (USP) of their service into their Twitter bio.
7. Use adjectives. Instead of saying you are a blogger, say you’re a tech blogger, instead of calling yourself a freelancer, say you’re an experienced freelancer. I use the term “passionate writer” in my bio to distinguish myself from those who write just for money. I write because it’s a passion. Adjectives add flavor to your bio.
8. A dash of personality. Personally, I feel any Twitter bio is incomplete without this key element. It’s what makes us human (read: interesting). Don’t be afraid to show some personality; done tastefully this can augment your business bio rather than detract from it. I put in “fire-breathing dragon” in my personality section because I want people to know I’m a no-nonsense go-getter. See examples below of other great bios that have a smidgen of personality.

How Do I Fit It All In?

It’s all very well to provide a laundry list of what to include in a Twitter bio, but you may be wondering how the heck am I going to fit all this material in 160 characters? Here are some tips and tricks:

• Use short phrases. It’s a good idea to use phrases instead of complete sentences; they save space and can convey the same amount of value. So instead of “I have 15 years of experience in internet marketing” write “internet marketing veteran.”
• Use symbols. I really like the pipe symbol (|) as a separator of key terms. It looks very slick and saves tons of space! Else, just use a comma or semi-colon. Use abbreviations that your industry understands: Example B2B, SEM, etc. You don’t have to use all of the above: stick to what feels comfortable and how much you want to disclose.

Examples of Great Twitter Bios

Here are some examples of great Twitter bios:

• @BtoBSocialMedia. BtoBSocialMedia offers daily b2b business tips on using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media to increase brand awareness and social influence.
• @PeterShallard. The Shrink for Entrepreneurs who want freedom, wealth & sanity. 100% Organic Tweeter
• @backupmytweets. Did you know that Twitter only gives access to your most recent 3,200 tweets? Our service will keep your tweets forever!
• @garyvee. Family 1st! but after that, Businessman, @winelibrary, @Vaynermedia, Author of Crush IT and a dude that loves the hustle, people and the @nyjets.
• @marieforleo. CEO | Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur I’ll Turn You Rich Happy & Hot W/a Badass Combo Of Marketing Wisdom, Spiritual Power Tools & Irresistible Booty Moves

And with that, I hope you are off to write or re-write your Twitter bio!

Twitter forces us to condense our thoughts, use brevity and still convey lots of meaning. That’s a big challenge for most people. Find what defines you best and construct your bio using that information. Think of your bio as a concentrated version of your tweets.

Your Turn

Did I miss an important point about Twitter bios? Do you want to showcase a great Twitter bio you’ve seen?

Add it all in the comments below!

Follow this step by step process of creating professional print ready design files for your letterhead and compliment slips stationery designs. We’ll build the design in Adobe Illustrator with the appropriate bleed and margin settings, then use a mix of Adobe Distiller and Adobe Acrobat to export and check over the final design files.

The letterhead and double sided comp slip designs for Jack’s are all tied together with the bright colour scheme and vertical stripes.

View the letterhead and comp slip designs

Illustrator?! Why not InDesign?

InDesign is often the application that springs to mind when people think of designing for print, but Illustrator actually has all the powerful print related tools you need to create simple print work. Seeing as I use Illustrator on a daily basis, I know my way around it much more than I do InDesign. Therefore I tend to use my own little rule that if a print project is just one or two pages I’ll use Illustrator, anything more like a booklet or brochure and I’ll make use of InDesign’s advanced paging tools.

If you’re considering using Photoshop. Stop right there! Although it’s quite possible to create print work entirely in Photoshop you really are better of laying up your design files in Illustrator or InDesign – These apps have built in support for setting up bleed, will render fonts much better and make it easy to export print ready PDF files. Use Photoshop for editing photos and making cool backgrounds but import these files as JPEGs into your print file.

Designing the letterhead

Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. This is where we’ll set up the file according to our print specifications. I’m working in ISO paper sizes and millimeters here as that’s what I’m used to, but I know US folk use Letter proportions and inches. Consult with the printer you’ll be using to check what dimensions and bleed are required. An A4 page is 210x297mm, and most printers require 3mm bleed on each side. Make sure the Color Mode is set to CMYK (‘cos we’re designing for print) and set the Raster Effects to 300ppi (we’re not using any Raster Effects today, but this will make sure your Drop Shadows etc come out nice and smooth).

You can see the A4 document size with the 3mm bleed margin in red. One other margin we’ll need is our ‘safe zone’, this ensures our page elements aren’t so close to the edge that they’re at risk of falling off and generally helps balance your design. Drag margins to each edge of the artboard. Select the left and bottom margins and hit Enter. Input 10mm in both fields, then select the top and right margins, hit Enter and input -10mm.

A nice colour scheme is crucial for any design. If you’re working on a stationery project chances are you’ll be using the company’s corporate colours. Here I’ve found a nice and bright palette from ColourLovers. In a new document draw a long rectangle.

Select the first colour from your palette and draw a series of randomly sized rectangles vertically across the larger rectangle.

Select the next colour from your palette and draw more random rectangles. Continue this process until the whole area is filled with lots of lines.

Select the background rectangle and make a copy (CMD+C), then group all the objects together. Paste in a duplicate of the rectangle using the Paste in Front command (CMD+F), clear out the fill then select this along with the group and click the Crop button from the Pathfinder palette. (Turn on tooltips in Preferences to see the icon names).

Paste a copy of the clipped series of rectangles into the Letterhead design file. Draw a thin rectangle within the bleed area across the top of the design, then use the Direct Selection Tool to move one of the corner points upwards to create a diagonal bottom edge.

Select this shape along with the grouped lines and click the Crop button from the Pathfinder palette to trim down the lines to the confines of the masking shape.

Use the Pen tool to place a point on the bottom left and bottom right edges to trace the angle of the diagonal line, then complete the shape to leave a thin angled rectangle.

Fill this thin rectangle with a black to transparent gradient, then use the Gradient adjustment tool to rotate the angle so the gradient flows exactly perpendicular to the bottom edge. This gradient adds a subtle shading effect which really enhances the design.

Paste in the company logo in the top left and align it to the safe margins. The Jack’s logo I’ve created is a simple circle filled with the darker pink from the colour palette with the name set out in the fun hand-written font of Freehand 575.

The company contact details are then laid out in Helvetica Condensed Light at 12pt with a large leading of 24pt to give a nice amount of breathing space around each line.

Copy and paste the series of lines from the top edge of the page, rotate them by 180 degrees and position them along the bottom edge. We don’t want the footer design to take up quite as much space, so align the diagonal line with the 10mm safety margin. Draw a rectangle to cover the lines up to the bottom bleed margin, then use this along with the Pathfinder palette to crop the footer to size.

That’s the letterhead complete! The design includes some creative additions but still leaves plenty of space for the actual page content.

Designing the compliment slip

Create a new document for the comp slip. The general size here in the UK is 1/3 of an A4 page (210x99mm). Our cool client from Jack’s has agreed to splash out and has allowed us to create a double sided comp slip design, so make sure change the settings to 2 artboards.

For the reverse side of the compliment slip we’ll fill the whole page with that cool lined design. Paste in the original graphic, then select the Rectangle tool and click on the artboard. Enter the dimensions of 216x105mm (basic comp slip size plus 3mm bleed on each edge).

Align the rectangle to the artboard using the Align palette (change the settings under the Align To icon), then to move it within the red bleed margin hit the Enter key and input -3mm and 3mm in the horizontal and vertical fields.

Use the Crop feature from the Pathfinder to trim the design to size. This background design needs to fit within the bleed area rather than the main artboard so no thin white edges of paper appear if the printed document shifts slightly when the document is guillotined to size.

Typically comp slips contain the same design as used on the letterhead, so paste in the objects from the letterhead file and move them into place on the document.

Creating print-ready files

One everything is saved, approved and ready to send to the printer head to File > Print in your design files.

In the print dialogue box change the Printer drop down to Adobe Postscript File. Note: You can also print directly to PDF, see my other business card tutorials for the step by step.

Move down to Marks and Bleed in the options and check the Trim Marks and Registration Marks boxes.

Move back to the General options section and change the Media Size to Custom. In the preview window you should see the print area has expanded to include the print marks.

Save the file, then open up Adobe Distiller. Change the drop down setting to Press Quality then drag the postscript files into the Distiller window.

Distiller will save print ready PDF files into your folder. Open them up in Acrobat to check over the final details before sending them off to your printer. You’ll notice the double sided comp slip is all combined together into a two page PDF file.

Download the source file

As you learned from my Myers-Briggs self-assessment, I’m the kind of guy that rather blend in than stand out in a crowd. That means I can produce killer content, but don’t get a gold medal when it comes to self-promotion.

As I was sitting in traffic this morning thinking up ways to promote my blog offline, it occurred to me that a great opportunity could be staring me right in the face…literally.

What about a vanity license plate?

PROS

Promotion: For a $50 fee and $31.25 annually, my blog’s name will be visible to everyone who spots my car. In this day and age of “Googling” everything that strikes an interest, I’m sure the name might stick with a few people who will search it at a later date.

Forced promotion: Growing up my dad had a vanity plate at one point, it was an acronym comprised of our family member’s first initials. I can recall several times when he was questioned on the plate’s meaning. Every query is a chance to promote my blog to a stranger.

Brand awareness: It also helps raise general brand awareness. When driving 12k miles a year, someone is bound to notice the name. If they happen to see it again down the road, the seeds have already been planted.

CONS

Drivers can “find” me: Anyone who has driven a vehicle knows how a perceived action can turn a mild-mannered individual into a raging lunatic. If that guy thinks I cut him off on Broadway and is pissed off, he might end up slamming my blog – or worse yet – combing through domain records and associations to track me down.

Anonymity shattered: As much as I strive for world blog domination, I don’t want everyone to know what I do in my spare time. A license plate would make it difficult to hide the blog from work colleagues, friends, neighbors, etc. Vanity plates also are easier to remember than random plates, therefore they are more likely to get tied to the scene of an accident – even if you were not involved.

I’ve been going back and forth on the idea. I feel fortunate that my blog name is short and available in my state, but am unsure that I want to take on that level of transparency.

What do you think? Is a vanity license plate a worthwhile vehicle to promote your blog or business?