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 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 go. Criminals regularly exploit this by prompting un­sus­pect­ing users to clink on links that lead to damaging content. As a result, many users opt out of clicking 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 products 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 or­ga­niz­ing 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.