Twitter is one of the best advertising platforms where you can drive more qualified traffic to your blog, website, or the product page. There are more than 330 million monthly active users on Twitter. That number alone is significant enough to rocket your marketing team and provide a mouth-watering incentive. How about the fact that 51% of Twitter users earn more than $50,000 per year? Isn’t that mind-blowing? However, it has come to our notice that we’re all familiar with Twitter’s 140 characters. Fortunately, there is a solution. Twitter cards allow you to transfer plenty of useful and engaging information to your followers without exceeding the character limit.
In this article, we’ll go over how the card is really beneficial to a marketer or small business owners, we are also going to understand the types which are best to use, and how to set up and verify your Twitter card. And best practices to know to make proper use of and allow your card to stand out from the crowd.
What are Twitter Cards?
If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video or clicked on a photo with your Twitter stream, then you’ve already come across a Twitter card. The card is what allows users to have this full media experience that goes beyond the standard limit of 140-character written messages within Twitter or whenever tweets have links to a site’s content. Twitter cards were designed to solve the problem of Twitter not allowing users to tweet more than 140 characters at a time.
Back then, using a Twitter card was an effective way of going beyond the restricted character limit. Hence, providing you more space to engage your followers. However, Twitter cards still serve the same purpose for some today. An update was made by Twitter to their character limit from 140-280 characters, but the problem still looks unresolved because many users still hit this limit.
Benefits of Using Twitter Card
Twitter cards have really helped business owners and marketers to stand out among others and have pulled them out from the usual tweets of wordy updates to their followers. Using Twitter cards;
- Makes your Tweets more attractive and clickable.
- Drives traffic to your website.
- Helps you grow app downloads using effective Twitter app cards.
- Helps you to gain followers through visual interactions.
- Makes you gain more visibility on Twitter
- Encourages conversions from being an ordinary follower.
- Helps you gain insights into more clicks, app downloads, and tweet shares.
It has been observed that Tweets with media attachments get bigger exposure than the usual average tweet. Tweets carrying images get up to a 55% increase in leads and a 41% increase in retweets. All these can be achieved using Twitter cards. Now, the big question is what type of card should I use?
Types of Cards and their Description on Twitter
There are four different Twitter card types to show content previews, play videos, and drive traffic to sites. These cards also have a lot of different ground for different types of Twitter publishers as well as different marketing goals. We Have;
- Summary Cards: This type of Twitter card is Twitter’s default card and it includes a title, description, thumbnail image, Twitter account attribution, and a direct link to the original source. This card is useful for blog posts.
- Summary with Large image: This card is the same as the first one, but is provided with a big space for any beautiful image. Visual content producers might find this type of card useful.
- Player Cards: This Twitter card is very useful for music, video, or multimedia experts. It allows your followers to watch, and listen to a full-width thumbnail using a play button without having to leave Twitter
- App Card: This helps in driving traffic directly to an app; The Twitter app card is better, particularly on mobile.
How Do I Create a Twitter Card?
Have you gone through the different types of cards up there and you’ve picked your favorite card? Now it’s time to set them up.
- Select the card type: Select which Twitter card type to display once the page is linked in a tweet.
- Include Twitter Meta tags: Input the Twitter meta tags for that card type by copying and pasting your site into the <head> section of the target page.
- Twitter Card Test: Run the card test with the Twitter card validator by inputting (Using the copy and paste option) the URL of the page that now has the Twitter meta tags.
- Submit for Approval for Twitter player cards: Send a Twitter player card for approval by clicking ‘Request approval” for whitelisting.
Finally, Test the card type again; confirm the type displays correctly by tweeting a link to your site.