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1. andrewmacart hy.com
http://andrewmacarthy.com/andrew-macarthy-social-media/case-study-top-brands-twitter-background-branding
Case Study: Top Brands' Twitter Background
Design Fails
In a recent blog post, I offered my new Twitter background template as a free
download so that you can easily optimise your profile's design to be viewed as
intended on whichever screen resolution a desktop viewer is using. That got me
wondering... with teams dedicated to design and social media management, how do
the Twitter background designs of some of the world's biggest companies fare?
Across a random sample, I
screen grabbed the 1920 x 1200 (the biggest screen resolution at which people are
likely to view a Twitter profile) and 1366 x 768 (currently the most common screen
resolution, according to global statistics). The results were pretty surprising...
The Bad
Where the companies I came across had attempted specific Twitter branding on both
sides of the news feed, i.e. not just a single-image background), lots of the designs
had not been optimised for viewers on different resolutions. Here are a few
examples:

2. Here's the Twitter page for Gillette. At 1920 x 1200 pixels, the design looks great but
for the big black bar on the right-hand side which reveals that the navy gradient hasn't
been made big enough to accommodate for large displays. And at 1366 x 768 pixels,
the "Get the Look Women Want" branding is hidden behind the feed, while the image
on the right-hand side of the feed completely disappears!

3. Onto SmartWater now. As with Gillette, its Twitter profile suffers from a big empty
space on the right-hand side at high resolutions. At the most common resolution,
however, a "SmartWater" brand logo appears... well, most of it.

4. Last up, here's fast food company, Wendy's, who get things half-right. At high
resolution, its left-hand side Twitter branding is fine, but a second large image is
obscured by the news feed. At 1366 x 768 pixels, the design looks as it was probably
intended to.
The Good
It was surprisingly difficult to find good examples of optimised Twitter backgrounds
from the hour or so I spent looking at the feeds of big brands, so props go to Gap
and Sprite (kinda) for these examples!

5. Gap's Twitter background works at both the biggest resolution, and at the most
commonly viewed resolution. While one person is chopped off either side in the
reduced view, the design still looks great.

6. Finally, here's Sprite. Okay , the logo is chopped off the side in both examples, and
the lemon-sipping-a-drink graphic is missing in the high resolution review, but both
designs still mostly work!
Conclusion
From my terribly unscientific experiment, it seems that a significant proportion of big
brands, while keen on branding their Twitter accounts, have not done so in a way that
takes into account all of the different resolutions that people will be viewing their
pages at on desktop computers, resulting in branding that is unusually slack for such
big commercial voices.

7. If you want to stay one step ahead of Gillette, SmartWater, Wendy's, and many
others with an optimised Twitter background design, have a read of my Twitter
background Template blog post and grab a link to download the template there too.