You may have noticed fancy little tweets running through your stream, you know the ones with the summary and images, like in this embedded tweet below. They’re called Twitter Cards and they can help you increase your reach, and social media conversion goals. I’ve put together a Twitter Card Tutorial – that should help get you up and tweeting with cards in no time.
What Is Evernote – Simple SEO and Marketing Zen http://t.co/uVywZ7jHiX via @zen_of_design
— zen-of-design (@zen_of_design) June 30, 2013
As you can imagine, these summaries serve to drive more followers, traffic, and hopefully sales conversions. The Twitter card, I think, is going to be a powerful tool for tweeters looking to better educate their audience and prospects.
Twitter Card Tutorial – 5 Steps To Setting Up More Engaging Tweets.
1. Head Over To The Twitter Card Developers Site by clicking HERE
2. Choose what type of card you want to setup. I opted for trying the summary card first and I recommend this for first time users.
- There are 7 card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter’s web and mobile clients:
- Summary Card: Default card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
- Large Image Summary Card: Similar to a Summary Card, but offers the ability to prominently feature an image.
- Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo card.
- Gallery Card: A Tweet card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos.
- App Card: A Tweet card for providing a profile of an application.
- Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.
- Product Card: A Tweet card to better represent product content.
3. Add The Relevant Meta Tags To Your Sites Header. (make sure to put on the pages that you want to use the cards for)
Example Of Meta Tags For Twitter Card
4. Using the Card Validator on this page to test your meta tag setup. If twitter validates the meta tags you’ll get an image that looks like this.
Twitter Card Is Validated
5. After succesfully using the validator you can submit your card to twitter for approval. It should approve within minutes, though they say it can take much longer. You’ll be notified via email when you’ve been approved to start using twitter cards.
I Have No Idea How To Add Meta Tags To My Header – No Worries It Can Be Done Automatically With This Plugin
If you don’t know how to set this up using the meta tags there are a ton of videos on YouTube that can help you.
If you wanted to do this automatically, and you use wordpress, Yoast offers an excellent plugin for wordpress that can have your first twitter card up and running for you in a jiff. A twitter card tutorial might not be enough, if you want a really easy solution, use the Yoast plugin, I am.
Go here to get it free, or search for it in the plugins section of your wordpress admin panel. Search For “Yoast WordPress SEO”
