Twitter Cards - how to turn followers into website visitors

Due to its many different active users, Twitter is one of the best platforms for reaching a large audience with just a single post. The social media outlet’s current format­ting rules allow no more than 140 char­ac­ters per Tweet. Without Twitter Cards, linking to external content can only be done by including short URLs. The biggest problem with short links: they don’t really reveal where they lead to. Criminals regularly exploit this by prompting un­sus­pect­ing users to clink on links that lead to damaging content. As a result, many users choose not to click on short links.

Using Twitter Cards is an easy way around such dilemmas, since they neatly display their links in a preview format that users from other social networks, like Facebook, are also familiar with. Users are granted access to in­form­a­tion (e.g. preview pictures, teaser texts, optional info to linked pages, services, products, etc.) normally excluded from regular Tweets. Using this tool is more trans­par­ent and re­cip­i­ents generally feel more com­fort­able accessing its enclosed material.

There’s no shortage of material for those who think they may be in­ter­ested in preview snippets. A general in­tro­duct­ory video to the topic as well as various guides for its use and in­teg­rat­ing Twitter Cards can be found in the developer’s section of the social network.
Here you can find a list of different types of cards, which we’ve provided for you in short form here:

• Summary Cards: The classic Twitter card is perfect for different types of web content, like blog posts, news articles, or pro­mo­tions elements: de­scrip­tion, title, links, preview image
• Summary Cards with large image: Es­sen­tially follows the same structure as Twitter Summary Cards, but with a sig­ni­fic­antly larger preview image (located above the text). Great for high­light­ing product elements: de­scrip­tion, title, links, large preview image
• Photo Cards: Es­pe­cially well-suited to pho­to­graph­ers and companies ad­vert­ising with ex­press­ive imagery; clicking on the photo enlarges the view elements: de­scrip­tion, title, link, option for en­large­ment
• Gallery Cards: This Twitter Card displays a col­lec­tion of at least 4 photos in a gallery. This indicates that a series of similar photos can be found by clicking on the link elements: de­scrip­tion, title, link
• App Cards: These cards are used to present mobile apps. Download buttons help prompt mobile users to install the app elements: title, de­scrip­tion, icon, highlight attribute (reviews, price, app ID etc.)
• Player Cards: Player Cards display audio files like podcasts or videos. Streaming YouTube videos via Twitter is one such example elements: title, de­scrip­tion, in­teg­rated player, link
• Twitter Website Cards (fee-based): Opting for this feature allows users to advertise their website to a more targeted audience; this allows target group-oriented campaigns for website clicks Elements: title, de­scrip­tion, preview image, link, call to action

Before you go ahead and put your Twitter Cards to use, you first need to connect them to your website, online store, or blog. Twitter provides you with the ap­pro­pri­ate source code lines as soon as you have created your card. For many content man­age­ment systems, there’s a diverse array of plugins that, once installed, make using and or­gan­ising Twitter Cards a much more man­age­able feat. For those working on WordPress projects, JM Twitter Cards and Jetpack are es­pe­cially re­com­men­ded. While the former allows you to choose precisely which card you use, Jetpack auto­mat­ic­ally browses through your Twitter Card and searches for the best solution for the entry at hand. There’s also a lot of plugins to choose from for other CMSs: Joomla offers a Twitter Article Card that helps with similar tasks as those carried out with JetPack. Drupal even has in­teg­rated options for Twitter Cards when con­fig­ur­ing meta tags, meaning that no plugin is needed. Once you’ve in­teg­rated the code into your web project, all you need to do is go through and check everything one more time with the Twitter Card validator. Sign in with your Twitter account and then access the validator. In the input box, ‘Card URL’, enter the address of your website that you’ve con­figured the Twitter Cards for. Once everything has been checked, you’ll receive a con­firm­a­tion e-mail stating that your Twitter Cards have been of­fi­cially au­thor­ised. It normally takes a few days before they actually start attaching to your Tweets.