Twitter: A Guide Through The Settings
Recently, we published a Twitter terminology guide for everyone who isn’t on the Twitter bandwagon yet. Now we’ll take a look at the settings board, so you can easily set up your account properly.
To get to it, you’ll need to be logged in into your Twitter profile. Click on your username in the upper right corner on that black Twitter bar. Pick Settings and let’s go!
Account
- Name – Your name can be changed in the Profile settings, however, don’t change it yet;
- Username – this is your Twitter handle, your @username. You shouldn’t change your username because there’s a chance that someone will take the previous one. Other people might also find it annoying if you change your username and/or Name often because they won’t know who to mention;
- Tweet Location – When this option is enabled, you’ll be able to choose to add a location to your tweets or not;
- Tweet Media – Choose whether to display media marked as a sensitive content and mark your media as a sensitive content as well;
- Tweet Privacy – If you choose to protect your tweets, you’ll have to approve every single follow request; nobody will be able to see or follow your tweets before you approve it. Although it’s great for privacy, protected accounts aren’t really popular within the Twitter community – why should I follow you if I can’t see what you’re tweeting? Also, your tweets won’t appear in searches when protected;
- HTTPS Only – for better account security, enable this setting.
Mobile
Today’s smartphones have many Twitter applications. If you don’t own one, you can still use Twitter via its mobile web interface. However, you can even send tweets via a SMS text message. Set up your phone number and send SMS messages as tweets to numbers shown in this tab. They will appear on your timeline as your tweets.
Notifications
If you don’t want to get your email inbox crowded with notifications that someone mentioned you, turn off some of them. If you have a mobile application which will ping you on every mention or direct message, there’s no need to get an email about it as well, right? You might want to keep notifications on new followers and Twitter service updates.
Profile
- Picture – your avatar which will be used in your every tweet. Choose a high resolution image if possible;
- Name – you can change your name here, however, mind that some applications show your name instead of your username. Don’t confuse your followers;
- Location – Tell your followers where you are;
- Web – If you have a website, link it here;
- Bio – your short biography (160 characters) which shows up under your profile image;
- Facebook – you can link your Twitter profile with your Facebook profile so your tweets get forwarded to your Facebook. We don’t recommend doing that, but you’re free to try it out and choose for yourself.
Design
If you want to change the background on your profile or colors of the links, texts, borders etc., this is the tab you’re looking for. You can choose backgrounds from templates or upload your own, or you can choose a theme which will set everything up for you.
Applications
Every time you log into some web service with your Twitter account, that service get here. Every application with a granted access to your Twitter profile is also listed here. Keep this list clean and allow only necessary application to have access to your account. If you happen to find out that something is wrong with your Twitter account (eg. there are some tweets that weren’t sent by you) – change the password and clear the list of applications.
Use this settings guide with our terminology guide and you now have a complete technical background for one of the most popular and fastest social networks. Have fun on Twitter!
