Have you looked at your Twitter profile lately? How’s it looking? Good? Bad? Ugly?

If you’re feeling good about your profile, great! If you fall more in the bad or ugly camp: have you covered the basics?

You see, the beauty of Twitter is its simplicity.  There’s not a lot of room to make mistakes in terms of optimizing your profile. If you’re having trouble getting started, the following to-do list should get you well on your way to establishing the essentials:

• Get your account verified – A verified account displays a badge of authenticity and limits any confusion surrounding actual ownership of the account.  Twitter doesn’t accept account verification requests, but I imagine a large corporation may be able to twist their wing.
• Establish an explicit purpose – An explicit purpose lets followers know what they can expect from your Twitter presence; this mitigates the potential for backlash from followers.  They may not think your purpose is extensive enough, but at least there’s no confusion as to why you’re in the space.
• Provide a bio – Pretty self-explanatory here: a bio tells the follower a little about the account or company.
• Link to your other social channels – Linking to other social channels lets followers know where else your brand can be found in social.  This can lead to increased traffic on other channels, as well as higher levels of engagement with your brand.
• Display a custom skin - The skin allows you to modify the page to reflect your brand and can be used to communicate additional information (i.e. personalities managing the page, links to other social presences, page disclaimers, etc.) to your followers.
• Display a profile pic – Plain and simple, just upload your logo.

You’re probably thinking the above list looks fairly elementary — you’re not mistaken. Nevertheless, these basics are sometimes overlooked.  Wanting to test this hypothesis, I decided to scrutinize the top 10 of 2011′s Fortune 500 companies under the given criteria.  Here’s how they fared:

Key takeaways?

The good:

• 100% of active brands studied have created and uploaded a customized skin, enhancing the brand experience for followers.
• 100% of active brands studied have authored a bio, helping followers understand a little more about the company and/or account.
• 100% of active brands studied have uploaded a photo, completing what is arguably the most simple of tasks.
• Props to Bank of America for having all of the basics covered.

The bad:

• 56% of active brands studied don’t have verified accounts.  Don’t think this is a problem? Perhaps the threat of being brandjacked will change your perspective.
• 56% of active brands don’t have links to other social channels, limiting their ability to connect with followers across multiple platforms.

The ugly:

• 67% of active brands studied haven’t established an explicit purpose, leaving followers in the dark as to why the brand is active in the channel.

The above results suggest that I’ve somewhat underestimated the studied brands.  My apologies.  However, there remains–and always will remain–some room for improvement.  By following the basics outlined above you’ll have won a tiny, tiny battle that will help prepare you for your eventual Twitterloo: maintaining an engaging Twitter presence–a post topic I’ll save for a rainy day.

Update: Readers have brought to my attention that @GMCustomerSVC is not GM’s official corporate PR account, rather @GM is. In light of this, I have reassessed their presence and am pleased to share that they have covered all of the basics. Of note, this also reduces both the number of active brands without verified Twitter accounts and links to other social channels to 44%.