Do you want to stand out from the crowd of avatars on Twitter? Do you want to catch people’s attention as they scroll down your tweets or look at other people’s followers? Then try an animated avatar!
The trick, though, is finding the line between flashy and distractingly annoying. I have seen videos of webcams used as well as screen recordings. Slideshow videos would also work.
My first try was annoyingly distracting and a follower asked me to tone it down a bit, which I did. Some people will just unfollow me, but that doesn’t bother me. I love looking at other people’s animations, it’s like looking through a virtual window into their soul!
1. If you are going to use a video clip, feed it into a video editing program to capture approximately 4 seconds (Twitter avatars must be less than 700kb). Or create one from scratch, like a slideshow video, webcam recording, or slideshow video. REMEMBER it will loop over and over, so watch to make sure there isn’t a jarring jump between the end and beginning of the video. Windows Movie Maker, the Commercial Creation Center (http://www.CommercialCreationCenter.com), or Camtasia are great creation and editing tools – you decide which one is easy enough to learn quickly. Save the video as .wmv if you are NOT creating it in Camtasia. You’ll see instructions below on how to “produce” it in Camtasia.
2. The most important thing that Camtasia will do is produce the video as an animated GIF. If you have Camtasia (a free version is available), you can also create, edit and export there. Choose 150 x 112 pixels as the final size, which is the standard thumbnail size. If you don’t want to use Camtasia, there is a site that will convert the video to GIF for you (http://www.gifninja.com), but the final file sizes are larger, so you’ll still have to cut your video down. longer, possibly 2 seconds or so.
3. Upload your saved animated GIF to your Twitter account photo. We’ve seen Firefox give error messages that Twitter is overloaded, but just continue or switch to another browser. It will take eventually.
Get feedback from your followers on whether or not you’re too busy, and refine your photo until you and your favorite followers are happy. But remember, you can’t please everyone, so don’t bother trying. If you are satisfied with it, allow yourself to enjoy it and change it from time to time to break the monotony.
