Twitter cards

Are you a blogger or a marketer and you want to advertise and share your links and products on Twitter?

Well you can use Twitter Cards to share your links and products in a more attractive way.

It helps you attract attention in news feeds and get better results from your ads.

Let's begin... What is a Twitter card?

I'm not going to bore you with useless stuff; A Twitter Card is a fancy preview of a post or ad from your website or blog on your tweet. In short adding Twitter Cards to your websites basically serves "two purposes". Firstly, they make tweets from you or your sites Twitter handle stand out in news feeds. You can see a preview below.

(The image above shows a normal summary card )

Second, you get in-depth analytics of the engagement you receive from tweets with Twitter cards from your website or blog.

With four different card types to choose from you can use Twitter Cards to do things like

View an image
Watch a video
Visit a blog or website
Download an app

Without them having to leave twitter.

By using Twitter cards you get multiple benefits, like;

A consistent look for your posts across platforms (anyone who shares content that has Twitter cards code in place will produce the same media-rich tweets)

Consistent attribution that could drive more traffic to your site and increase the number of people following you

Custom titles and descriptions for your photo or URL (a lot of extra room above and beyond the tweet’s standard 140!)

A really awesome mobile experience for your audience.

Now that you've gotten an idea of the benefits of using Twitter Cards, let's move on to the types of Twitter Cards;

Summary Cards

There are two types of summary cards that work well for articles, blog posts, and other informational pages on your website. A normal summary card and a large photo summary card.

The normal summary card are Twitter’s “default” card and include a title, description, thumbnail image, Twitter account attribution and a direct link to the content. These are great for blog posts!

The large photo summary card have all the same features of a regular summary card, but they trade a bit of the description space for a big, beautiful image. Highly visual content producers might want to think about this card.

Now let's move on to the others;

The Player Card
If you work in music, video, or multimedia, a player card is a must. This card allows your audience to watch, listen, or click through your media without leaving Twitter. Think YouTube, SoundCloud, Vine, etc. Here’s how YouTube’s card allows users to watch a YouTube video while staying put within Twitter.

The App Card

For driving traffic directly to an app, the Twitter app card is ideal—particularly on mobile. When an app with cards enabled is mentioned on Twitter, this card shows the app’s name, ratings, price and icon, along with a short description. The link takes viewers directly to the App Store to download. The call-to-action only displays in the Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, and only when the user does not already have your app installed. iOS and Android users see details about the app specific to the device they’re on.