Understanding Twitter Cards and Their Use for Businesses
If your business has spent any amount of time using Twitter, you may have heard of a feature called Twitter Cards. While this feature can be very useful for businesses, it can also be a bit confusing. That’s why we put together the following guide to help answer common questions and assist your business with putting Twitter Cards into action.
The Basics of Twitter Cards In 2007, Facebook created a platform for developers. This platform included a social graph. In 2010, Facebook extended the graph through the social media Open Graph. The purpose of that extension was to include websites and pages that people liked throughout the web. Then in 2011, Facebook extended the Open Graph to include other actions and objects created by apps and enable those apps to integrate deeply into the Facebook experience. If you’re wondering why we’re talking about Facebook in a post about Twitter Cards, it’s because this feature is part of Facebook’s Open Graph Meta tags. While
this is a conversation that can quickly get very technical, the main thing you need to remember is the Open Graph is about using rich data. For Twitter Cards, that means an enhanced way to tweet messages.
Using Twitter Cards for Your Business There are a variety of social media Twitter Cards that businesses can do to create more engaging content and share it through the Twitter platform. Summary Cards are the first. These cards add a preview excerpt to a link that’s tweeted out. There are also Summary Cards with Large Images. Not only do these types of tweets have a preview excerpt, but they also include a large image from the source. Given that images continue to drive an increasing amount of online activity, this can be a very compelling option. Product Cards are another format that can work very well for many businesses. This type of tweet includes product images and a description. A Player Card can also be a great format. This is used to play video clips in Twitter. Since video is becoming even more popular than images in many cases, using this format is an excellent way to increase engagement via Twitter. As far as the technical details needed to make Twitter Card work, we recommend the official Cards Markup Tag Reference from Twitter. This documentation covers everything that the technical members of your team will need to get this functionality running. Once the technical implementation is taken care of, you’ll be able to experiment with different types of Twitter Cards to see which ones drive the best results for your business.
Published by: Nigel Miller VP Sales & Marketing at Send Social Media 1-888-329-4453