Most people on Twitter are using a photograph of themselves as their Twitter profile image and that is of course a nice thing. It’s nice to know what a person looks like when you are communicating and it gives a certain sense of trust, but since this is a blog about internet marketing I have to ask myself if that’s optimal if you are trying to grow your number of followers.

From a marketing point of view

If you look at the thumbnails of the people a person is following you most commonly find a bunch of faces, and only a few others have chosen to use logos and other images.

What really made me write this post is that a bunch of the people that I am following, are following this other guy who has a black whale tail on a yellow sign as his profile image. That got my attention as soon as I saw it. I clicked it, just to find out that I didn’t find that person too interesting (no offence) at the moment, but as I started to follow more people that black whale tail on the yellow sign seemed to be on almost everyone’s follow list. So, I clicked it a few more times and finally he got me.

Now I am also following the whale tail man, and that would not have been if he had used a photo of himself as his Twitter profile image.

Conclusion

What I am trying to say in a very non-scientific way is that, using an image that separates you from the masses might help you to grow followers. It’s definitely worth some testing.

If you choose to use some image other than your photo as your profile image, you might want to consider creating a custom Twitter background image that contains a picture of yourself, as an example you can check out Mike Filsaime.

If you want to know what that black whale tail on a yellow sign Twitter profile image looks like you can visit Ross Mayfield on Twitter.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.