Why the Username and the profile picture is important

Since the last 1,5 years, many people have asked me: What are the keys of a successful Twitter account? I have to say, I am not the person who knows everything about what will be successful and what will fail on Twitter, but I have a lot of experience. Actually, I am confident to say that I have among the best experience in this field on Twitter. You can say that I love to do my homework: I enjoy experiments, looking at statistics and do Twitter research daily.

What I have believe is the key to get a successful Twitter account is not one. I strongly believe that there are never only one reason why a Twitter account blows up, or why a Twitter account all of suddenly loses it's influence on it's audience. In this blog post, I will tell you more about Twitter usernames and profile pictures and why it matters.

According to an old friend who is very successful on Twitter and have over 2,5 million followers today, the two important keys to be successful on Twitter are these. Without these, he says that you cannot succeed:

• The Username of your Twitter Handle
• The Profile Picture of your Twitter Handle

I strongly believe that these two keys are very important, but absolutely not critical. To prove to you that you can succeed without 1 of these factors, look at these two examples. One has an egg profile picture and one has a very bad username, however, both these Twitter accounts are very powerful. 

Screenshot from www.twitter.com/sickipediabot

Screenshot from www.twitter.com/Lord_Voldemort7

The usernames and the profile picture are not the only things that matters, but I still believe they are important.

Worth thinking about is, these two accounts grew big about 2 years ago and most new Twitter accounts who have been big, have had good usernames and good profile pictures though.

My suggestions about Usernames and Profile pictures are:

Usernames: A username is your life on Twitter. It has to be remembered easily. It should look official and not like you just took the first free username that you could find; a person who cared would spend more time to find something good. Mostly, usernames with "_" and numbers won't get viral as much as usernames without _ and without numbers. 

Back in the days I always heard that usernames shouldn't have too many characters so if someone wants to comment you they can have more characters to comment with, but I am not sure about that's true; some usernames can still look official with many characters. For example, I would rather have the username @Amazing than @Amzng because @Amazing looks official. 

Also, you can actually gladly use the capital letter i instead of a small L and you can use a small L instead of a big i to make your username look more official, even though you rather shouldn't -- but many accounts with that has been growing a lot anyway! About 8 months ago, there was a big and very successful parody account of Will Smith, with @wili instead of @will, however, the last i in @wili were big so it looked like @will. That account was one of the best parody accounts ever.

Profile Pictures: Shouldn't be an egg. It's very important that the profile picture looks good as a small icon. Icons are actually very hard to give guidelines for -- it's just a very big difference in the amount of retweets some profile pictures gets. You should simply try until you find something good. I've done many experiments and just simply changing a profile picture has sometimes resulted in an 90% lower retweet rate! Instead of getting 100 retweets, I got 10 retweets.

Thanks, that's the two steps for today, hope you got it!

Anton Perlkvist, The Twitter Entrepreneur

TWITTER.COM/FUN