How To Use Twitter Cards To Make Your Website Stand Out
This is a guest post – Nital is the founding director at Octos with more than 8+ years of experience under his belt in this field with a profound level of expertise in search strategies, planning and management. He has served big corporate brands of Australia and is proudly managing Octos, one of the top 16 SEM agencies in AU and NZ after the big win of Google ‘All Stars’ Competition 2015. He is a talented and motivated individual who likes to keep everyone around him happy and content. Nital can be connected on LinkedIn.
Welcome Nital…
In the Twittersphere, everything is pared down to just 140 characters: every opinion, every idea, every outcry, every statement, every taunt, and every retort. The bite-size simplicity of the humble Tweet is the crux of the genius behind the platform’s success. It really is quite incredible how potent and provocative those lean 140-character combinations can be.
The Tweet has become an integral component of the communications mix for most social-media-savvy brands. At this stage of the digital revolution, integrating social media into your website is no longer optional. To stay relevant, every business must take part in the incessant social media conversation.
Twitter is a great platform for engaging with customers and contributing to industry-specific conversations. But, with its emphasis on text, the popular micro-blogging format did not always lend itself to visual communication – until the Twitter Card came along.
Twitter Cards are a relatively new trend, but savvy marketers are already using them to engage their audiences. With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experiences to Tweets, with a view to driving more traffic to your website. By simply adding a few lines of HTML code to your webpage, any users who Tweet links to your content will have a ‘Card’ added to their Tweet, which is visible to all of their followers.
Twitter Cards help to distinguish your content from the rest of the Twitter stream, making it more likely that your customers will see, click and retweet your posts. If you don’t have Twitter Cards set up on your website, any tweets linking back to your site will appear in followers’ Twitter feeds with purely text (like the image below).
If you have a genius wordsmith crafting your tweets, you may still manage to nab the attention and imagination of your readers. After all, Twitter has always been about succinct, clever use of words to convey meaning. But without images or rich media, it’s easy for your messaging to get lost in the echo chamber – especially now that your words are competing for eyeballs with an extensive raft of impressive visual and sonic distractions.
Laying The Cards On The Table
Before getting started with Twitter Cards, think about what kind of customer engagement you want to boost. Do you want users to see pretty pictures or videos of your products? Perhaps you need to drive subscriptions or app downloads?
Whatever your business goal, there is a Twitter Card to match it.
The five main types of Twitter Card are:
1. Summary Card
Popular among blogs and news outlets, the Summary Card incorporates a title, a description, a thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution. This format is popular among publications that frequently share content and wish to boost readership of their articles.
The specs for Summary Card Tweet are:
Title: 70 characters
Description: 200 characters
Image Size: Minimum 120×120 pixels and Maximum 1MB
2. Summary Card with Large Image
2. Similar to a Summary Card, this format includes a prominently featured image (rather than a thumbnail). The enhanced visual component makes this card format popular with brands that wish to promote their products. You know what they say: A picture tells a thousand words. That’s a whole lot more words than you’ll ever be able to make out of 140 measly characters.
The specs for a Summary Card with a Large Image are:
Title: 70 characters
Description: 200 characters
Image Size: Minimum 280 ×150 pixels and Maximum 1MB
3. App Card
3. The App Card allows for a name, description and icon, and also to highlight features about your app, such as its rating or price. If a Tweet with an App Card is viewed from a mobile device, the user is given a direct link to download the app.
This Card is a great way to promote mobile applications on Twitter and to drive downloads and installations. Users don’t need to bounce around from one platform to the next in order to download a new app – the App Card eliminates the kind of bothersome time-consuming redirects that might otherwise deter users from bothering with a download.
The specs for App Card Tweets are:
Title: Extracted from app ID
Description: 200 characters
Image Size: App logo extracted from app ID.
Must be JPG, JPEG, PNG or GIF format.
Minimum 800 × 320 pixels.
As Twitter pulls essential information from your app ID, this Card only works when an app is publicly available from an official app store.
4. Player Card
4. The Player Card enables the sharing of video, audio and rich media. By implementing a few HTML Meta tags to your website and complying with the Twitter Rules of the Road, you can deliver rich media, sound and movement to users.
Once you have the Player Card, your Vine videos can be displayed as part of your tweets and they will play automatically. If sound is your stock in trade, the Player Card now allows you to share music from your SoundCloud. The interface is simple and effective – a play button lets you play an audio clip without leaving Twitter.
This Twitter Card feature has massive potential for marketers and developers looking to stand out from the sea of text on Twitter. To activate the feature, all you have to do is add a couple of lines of code to your site.
The specs for Player Card Tweets are:
Description: 200 characters
Image Size: On platforms that don’t support iframes or inline players, an image will appear in place of the player. The image should have the same dimensions as your player. Maximum 1MB
Video: H.264 Coding, Baseline Profile, Main Profile Level 3.0 Maximum 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second
Audio: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Low Complexity Profile
Cold paws? Snow problem! https://t.co/sW83l8paOd https://t.co/IUnxYLDqPR
— Twitter (@twitter) November 30, 2015
5. Lead Generation Card
This card is a genius innovation for savvy digital marketers looking to generate fresh leads. With the Lead Generation Card, you can embed a customised call-to-action in tweets about your business. You need to have an advertising account set up with Twitter before you can activate lead generation cards.
Rather than just passively reading your tweets, this Card allows Twitter users to subscribe to your offers or join your mailing list right from within Twitter. For example, if you want people to register for your e-newsletter, this Card lets you include a ‘sign up’ button in tweets. It then automatically collects the user’s Twitter email address during the sign-up process. Data is compiled in a CVS file that can later be imported into whatever email-marketing tool you use.
The specs for Lead Generation Card Tweets are:
Title: 50 characters
Call to action: 20 characters
Post-submit message: 100 characters (optional)
Image Size: Minimum 800 x 200 pixels and Maximum 3MB. 4:1 Aspect Ratio
Getting Started With Twitter Cards
You should check with Twitter for detailed, up-to-date coding instructions. In most cases, setting up Twitter Cards is a simple 5-step process that takes less than 15 minutes to implement:
- Choose which card type is most appropriate for the kind of content and product that your business deals with.
- Add the appropriate Meta tags to your page.
- Run your URL against the validator tool to test. If you are working with a Player Card, request approval for whitelisting. All other Cards don’t need whitelisting.
- Once your Twitter Card is validated, Tweet the URL and check that the Card appears below your tweet in the details view.
- Measure your results with Twitter Card analytics. Through personalised data and best practices, Twitter Card analytics illuminates the pathway to improved key metrics such as URL clicks, app install attempts and Retweets.
If Twitter Cards aren’t activated on your website, you’re already missing out on being seen and heard by countless potential customers. Don’t drown in the Twitter stream – use Twitter Cards to make your Tweets cut through the noise.
About Nital
About NitalNital is the founding director at Octos with more than 8+ years of experience under his belt in this field with a profound level of expertise in search strategies, planning and management. He has served big corporate brands of Australia and is proudly managing Octos, one of the top 16 SEM agencies in AU and NZ after the big win of Google ‘All Stars’ Competition 2015. He is a talented and motivated individual who likes to keep everyone around him happy and content. Nital can be connected on LinkedIn.
Bonus 3
3 Free Templates
Download the 33 free templates from Toby and Adam’s book.
Content Marketing Sales Funnel
Your content marketing sales funnel is all about getting people to know, like and trust you by nurturing them with the right information at the right time.
