Twitter cards transform a 140 character message into something more engaging and visually appealing. With Twitter cards, you can add photos, videos, and other rich media content to your Tweets to make it more attractive to your audience. Setting up Twitter cards for your account can bring in many advantages. For instance you can get your audience or followers to download an app from a Twitter card, register at a website, view or use a coupon, visit a specific landing page and so on.
The advantage for the reader is that they don’t ever have to leave Twitter to engage in your card’s content. Twitter cards not only offer great versatility in its call to actions, it also brings a uniform and consistent look to your posts, has the possibility of more engagement and traffic, lets you add attractive titles and description which will otherwise not be possible within the 140 character limit and above all offer a great mobile experience which has always been lacking.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the different types of Twitter cards that are available to you and how you can set up Twitter cards for your account.
Twitter Card Types
At, present, there are 7 types of Twitter cards. Let’s take a look at each one of them.
1. Summary Card
- Twitter Summary Cards are the default card that contains a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
- It is ideal for anyone who has web content such as blog posts or news articles. It also works great for businesses with products to promote.
- The main focus of this type of card is to give the audience a preview of the content before users can click through to get to the main page.
2. Summary Card with Large Image
- Twitter Summary Cards with Large Image carry all the attributes of a Summary Card mentioned above.
- In addition, it features a full length prominent image alongside the tweet.
- The main focus of this type of card is to seduce the reader into clicking the image to reach your website.
3. Photo Card
- Twitter Photo Cards are cards with just a photo. It displays the photo prominently in the front and center. The image may also appear below the tweet text.
- Clicking the photo expands it to a fuller and richer view.
4. Gallery Card
- Twitter Gallery Cards lets you put together a collection of images within a tweet.
- This indicates to the user that the post contains a gallery of images.
- You can add up to 4 images in this type of card.
5. App Card
- Twitter App cards are ideal when you want to show off a mobile app with links to download it.
- You can add a name, description and icon as well as highlight attributes such as the rating and the price.
6. Player Card
Twitter Player Cards lets you add audio and video streams to your tweets.
7. Product Card
- Twitter Product Cards are ones that are optimized for providing product related information.
- It lets you showcase your products via an image and description, and lets you highlight 2 other key details about the product.
How to Set Up Twitter Cards Using WordPress Plugin JM Twitter Cards
Setting up Twitter cards is by no means an easy process. There are several different ways to setup Twitter Cards. If you know how to tweak codes like a pro, you can check out this page and select a card type to see how its done. If you are comfortable with using plugins, you can make use of one of 3 WordPress plugins that Twitter recommends: Jetpack, JM Twitter Cards and WordPress SEO by Yoast. In this post, I’ll show you how to setup Twitter cards using the JM Twitter Cards plugin.
1. Go to your WordPress dashboard->Plugins and download the JM Twitter Cards plugin.
2. Install and activate the plugin.
3. On your dashboard, go to JM Twitter Cards->General. Enter your Twitter username, site name, and select your card type.
4. If necessary, you can go to JM Twitter Cards->Images and change the fallback image in the settings. This image will show up if there are no images on your posts for Twitter to pick up.
5. Head over now to JM Twitter Cards->robots.txt and enable the option.
6. Once to have setup these basic features, you can go over to the post that you want to share with your readers in a Twitter card format. (If you haven’t published the post yet, go ahead and do it.)
7. At the bottom of the post, you have The Twitter Card settings which will show you a preview of the card. If you have WordPress SEO by Yoast, the Twitter card automatically pulls up the title and meta description from the plugin’s SEO settings. If you want to set up a custom SEO title and description, go to the Custom Fields section in WordPress (click Screen options at the top of WordPress dashboard and enable it if you cannot find it.), select allow_meta_description and add a value (in this case a description). Similarly add a value for allow_meta_title. Now input these 2 custom field names (allow_meta_description and allow_meta_title) in the Custom Fields page in JM Twitter Cards.
8. When you are satisfied with the preview, just hit the Validator button just above the preview. This will open up the Card validator page. Enter the URL of the post in the text box provided and click Preview Card.
9. You will get a dropdown displaying a string of information. Just hit the application approval button and wait for approval. I was able to get approval in less than 5 minutes for my card.
Now every time you tweet a post, you will be able to view it in the media rich format in which you chose to show it off.
While this is the happiest version of the tutorial, in reality you may find things to be a bit frustrating. If you are eager to use Twitter cards, just make sure you have some time on your hands to get it right. Julien Maury, the developer of this plugin has taken great efforts to set up extensive documentation, video tutorials and troubleshooting guide to help you set up Twitter cards. You can watch the tutorials before you set up the plugin, but the process isn’t too complicated so don’t worry.
One more point to remember is that should you wish to use a different type of Twitter Card, you must apply for it separately. Just change the type in the post and hit the Validator button to do that.
I found JM Twitter Cards to be the easiest to use and customize with plenty of options to bring out the best format for your cards and hope you will be able to set up Twitter Cards for your account in no time at all.
If you found this guide useful, be sure to check our archives for more Twitter tips and tricks.
Cheers,
Adeline
Leave a Reply