How to Add Usable URLs to Your Twitter Background

One very good reason for having a custom Twitter background is so that you can provide more information than will fit in the short 160 character bio, and since you can only list one URL in your bio area, it’s also a good way to let people know about your other websites, as well as your other social networking accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Flickr, etc.

Unfortunately there are two big drawbacks. First, the URLs you list can’t be made clickable and for the moment there’s no way around that issue. Second, the URLs, in most cases, are quite long, which poses two problems: There isn’t enough room to fit them all on one line, and no one is going to take the time to type them in manually, especially in the case of a Facebook URL like, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1056723395. I’m sure you’ve all seen backgrounds with a line something like, “Connect with me at these other places” and then a list of very long URLs that no one is every going to bother typing in.

There is the Memorable Web Address Facebook application that creates a short URL like www.profile.to/YourName but there are no similar options for the other social networking sites and I have a better solution that is quite elegant and gives you the opportunity to further brand your main website.

Instead of listing the very long URLs for all your social networks, you’re simply going to add the network’s name to the end of your web address like this: HughBriss.com/Facebook. Try it. Click the link and see where you end up. Okay, for the lazy among you I’ll save you the trouble, you’ll end up on my Facebook profile page.

So, instead of a list of very long unusable URLs, you’ll have a nice neat list of short, branded, memorable and easy-to-type URLs like this:

HughBriss.com/Facebook
HughBriss.com/LinkedIn
HughBriss.com/YouTube
HughBriss.com/Plurk

There are two ways to accomplish this. The first is only going to work for WordPress users but it’s the easiest because it’s a plugin. Click here to download the Redirection plugin.

The second way to do it will work for everyone that isn’t using the WordPress blogging platform. You will just add a single line of code to your website’s htaccess file. It’s called a 301 redirect and is most commonly used to redirect a surfer from a page that no longer exists to the current page, but it works just fine for our purpose as well.

Just add this line of code to your .htaccess file for each website or social network you want to list on your Twitter background. The original link does not need to exist so there’s no need to do anything besides adding / and the name of the redirect.

redirect 301 /LinkName  http://www.SiteToLinkTo.com

Example:

redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1056723395

I’m sure that most of you already have an .htaccess file to add the code to but if you don’t, simply create a text document, title it .htaccess, upload it to the root directory for your website or blog and then add the 301 redirects to the file as needed.

Another option:
Create a landing page on Facebook and add any information and links to your websites and social networking pages to that page and then link to that url in your Twitter bio. You’ll get the added benefit of picking up Facebook fans. Here’s mine as an example: Click here

Edit: There is a pseudo way to make your Twitter background clickable but the only way it works is if the viewer has installed a browser app. For more information, visit ClickableNow.com.

Edit 2: Since I wrote this post, Facebook added “vanity urls” which lets you shorten the url to your Facebook profile considerably.