Twitter Cards For Your Business

8 July 2014

Siobhan Hancock

How do you make your tweets stand out on Twitter?

In this blog I will give you a little insight to Twitter Cards. If you haven’t used them before I encourage you to read on and have a look at the possibilities, because it may just change your online pitch forever.

Twitter cards are a great way for your tweets to gain attention and increase your website’s traffic. By providing a different layout and style to a standard tweet, Twitter Cards provide a great opportunity to make your content look unique. Think about it… there are around 500 million tweets being sent every single day. How do you make sure an important tweet stand out from the crowd?

Twitter Cards are perfect if you want to make an announcement on Twitter. The examples I have made below showcase some great options for Ecommerce, bloggers, creative sites and people who generally want to have fun and become a Twitter Superstar.

At the moment there are 9 types of Twitters cards, I’ll talk about my favourite 5 in this blog.

The Summary Card

This card provides a number of ways to communicate with the reader and is one of the most popular cards on Twitter. It gives the reader a choice of whether they want to click through to your Twitter account, your website or even open the image bigger without being redirected to another website. All readers are different, some require a bit more of a push to be redirected away from Twitter & some don’t like to redirect away. This card entices people to read into the article or the company.

Google Fit is Android’s new health and fitness tracking platform #io14 http://t.co/AmqN2w1v32

— Mashable (@mashable) June 25, 2014

The Lead Generator Card

A great card for announcing a special offer or promotion. The lead generation card allows you to advertise an offer with an eye catching image and a direct way to get in touch. The ‘Sign Up’ button can directly link to an email address and allows the customer to get in touch immediately. Twitter use this themselves to invite you to join them on their platform. It is a great way of speaking to new potential customers.

Time market reversals with the divergence indicator: https://t.co/WPhSgVJpvc — Rob Booker (@robbooker) July 2, 2014

The Media Card

The media card is a fun Twitter card, it’s also a very powerful and eye catching card! Vines are getting more and more popular on Twitter, with more and more companies using them to get exposure. Vines can be a fun way to promote your channel, but they can also be a powerful marketing tool if utilised correctly. I read this fantastic article on Vines: Vines can change how you think.

“advertising agencies have been quick to seize on the potential of Vine”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21267741

It’s here, and it’s better than ever: the all-new 2015 #FordEdge. http://t.co/YiUJNDjvyS #FurtherWithFord

— Ford Motor Company (@Ford) June 24, 2014

The App Card

This card encourages your customers to download your app or apps you recommend. A great choice for anyone who has created their own app, as this card provides the user with a safe and direct link to download it. Although they tend to work best on smart phones, they do work on the web too – but may appear a little differently. Please see the link in the header for examples from Twitter themselves.

The Gallery Card

The Gallery card allows you to showcase multiple images at once and could be a great option for creatives or people who have been to an event. Twitter have specified up to four gallery images in a single tweet however keep your eye out for a update. Very recently, Burberry has partnered with Twitter to allow up to a whopping EIGHT images for the launch of their Spring/Summer 2015 show. Read the article here.

Our Schoolwear #offer ends tomorrow! Just use SCHOOL14 at checkout to save 10%! http://t.co/heH4qAkhe7 pic.twitter.com/eit6vCJM9I — Matalan (@Matalan) July 8, 2014

To Conclude…

Twitter cards are the perfect way to get the most out of your given 140 characters. We know it can be a pain to shorten what you want to say but that’s what is great about Twitter, it’s short and precise and that is what makes it a Tweet.

As mentioned there are more cards to choose from, such as product cards and website cards. The link at the top of this article provides all the information you need to get started with Twitter Cards. They also have an inbuilt Twitter analytics tool too, so you can measure the success and level of interest in your Tweets. Twitter Cards are easy to add, it just takes a few lines of HTML to your webpage to be able to do this, as explained here

Do you use Twitter cards? What kinds of experiences have you had with Twitter cards? Let me know in the comments below, or tweet me at @34SPSiobhan.

-Siobhan @34SPSiobhan 34SP.com UK web hosting