Twitter Cards: What They Are & How They Can Help You?

We now live in the age of engagement. As such, the content of social media posts becomes just as important. However, once upon a time, Twitter only gives you a 140-character to post content of this importance. Most users could have come up with quite creative solutions to go beyond these limits. So, Twitter cards may offer much more than these solutions in a much easier way. Moreover, it is completely free for everyone. Therefore, this situation reveals a great opportunity for both personal and corporate businesses. We have prepared a guide that will introduce you to these opportunities in this article. So, let’s get started.

Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Cards

In fact, this trend has been with us for a long time. However, it is never outdated. As such, everyone is curious about many things about them. Getting to know Twitter cards better means benefiting from them more efficiently. Because they are experts in providing great solutions for engagement and more Twitter traffic.

Today, the limits of tweets are much more flexible than before. This situation reduces their use compared to the past. However, there are many people who take advantage of them for the same cause still. Because although not as low as before, there is still a certain character limit for tweets. This limit is 280. For many users, such a limit increase was not enough to fulfill many functions. That’s why they still use Twitter cards. Let’s take a closer look at them in terms of usage.

Twitter cards create enough space that may help users engage more with their followers. Beyond this function, they appear as a visual component in the timeline. The biggest advantage is that they manage to stand out among the tons of new posts accumulating in your followers’ timelines. That is the most important secret of their ability to gain more engagement. The explanation is quite simple and understandable. Almost all of your followers will definitely see your posts, as they can stand out from dozens of posts in users’ timelines. More people seeing your posts naturally means you gain more engagement. Let’s talk about the advantages of Twitter cards in a little more detail.

What Are The Advantages Of Twitter Cards?

• The biggest advantage of using them is that they significantly increase your visibility on the platform.
• As your visibility on the platform increases, the engagements of your tweets will increase as well.
• The increase in the engagements your tweets gain helps you gain new followers.
• Twitter cards increase the appeal of your tweets. That will make them more clickable.
• They can be an effective method of increasing your website traffic as more users will see and click on them in their timeline.
• Twitter cards encourage customers to contribute to your conversions.
• It is a fact that tweets with a visual attachment are more clickable than average ones.

According to statistics, the contribution of such tweets to sales is more than 50%. Besides, it is a fact that these tweets receive one-third more retweets than average ones. As you can see from here, Twitter cards have a noticeable effect still. However, in order to benefit from these advantages, you need to know which Twitter card types to use. Let’s clear this issue up now.

Twitter Card Types

In order to get the most efficiency from Twitter cards, you should know which card type you should use. Therefore, you need to have enough knowledge about each card type. You should also understand how to use them properly. Twitter has actually introduced many different types of cards that will serve different purposes from the past to the present. For example, lead generation cards were one of them. However, the platform has decided to make a radical change in this regard today. And they have drastically reduced the number of Twitter card variants. For this, there are only four options that you can use today. However, these options are still successful in creating the effect that users expect. All you have to do is choose the right option, as we have mentioned earlier. So, without making you wait any longer, let’s continue by introducing the Twitter card types.

Summary Card

In a summary card, the limit of characters users can use in the title is 70. In the description part, this limit appears as 200. Images must be at least 120×120 pixels. Besides, they cannot be larger than 5 MB in size. The definition so far is the technical definition of summary cards. So, what are summary cards exactly? In fact, its name reveals what it is. These cards serve to summarize your web content for the platform. Let’s take web content as an example. If you want to share any web content as a summary card, the platform will organize it into a title, a description, and a snapshot. Then, you may share this summary card in your account in this way.

So, the most important function of the summary card is to help your followers understand what the content is about before they click the link. Summary cards also contain a content URL at the bottom. Thus, your followers may access the entire content easily by clicking on the URL if the preview attracts their attention. So, what types of usages are summary cards best suited for?

First of all, if you have a blog, you can share the content you publish there on Twitter as summary cards. So, you can get extra traffic to your blog. Besides, you can share the important activities taking place in your e-commerce store in this way. Moreover, you have the opportunity to promote even the products you have launched. You can also use summary cards to drive more traffic to your brand’s website. For this, you can share the latest news and developments about your brand on Twitter as a summary card.

Summary Card with Large Image

It has only one difference from summary cards in terms of functionality. As you can see from the name, this difference is related to the size of the image in the post. The title and description sections have the same character limits as the summary cards. On the other hand, the minimum limit of the image is 280×150 pixels. These images also cannot be larger than 5 MB. So what does it do, even though it has almost the same function as summary cards?

The main purpose here is to attract the attention of users with larger visuals. It is a fact that larger images stand out more among other posts on this platform. The type of user that benefits most from this Twitter card is institutions. For example, brands that want to announce their campaigns can attract the attention of users with larger visuals. Also, it is more advantageous to promote its product with a larger image for a brand that launches a new product. These cards are also ideal for displaying any infographic more clearly. In short, we can state that these cards are suitable for situations where it is important to highlight the image. If you want your image to attract attention, you can use them without hesitation.

App Card

Twitter has a financial reason for releasing App cards. Because in this way, they can sell ads to mobile app developers. When you think of mobile apps, don’t just think of games. The scope of this industry is very broad. So, why are we talking about this now? Because Twitter is one of the most convenient social channels for mobile app ads that you will publish through App cards. So, what do you think is the reason for this?

Twitter has a user base that can be analyzed down to the last detail. In other words, it is obvious which users are interested in the financial sector, bodybuilding, or games. That undoubtedly makes app cards great ad opportunities for mobile app developers. Let’s say you have developed a mobile app that allows users to monitor financial data instantly. In this case, thanks to the app cards, you can enable financial users to view them directly on their timelines. How efficient is that? So, thanks to them, your ads will not be visible to people who will not be interested in your app. So, you don’t have to pay unnecessarily per-view ad fees. Moreover, your conversion rates will be much higher, as people who may be interested in your mobile app view your ads. Let’s talk about what they look like now.

The title of the app cards comes from the app ID. However, the description part also has a 200 character limit like other cards. The image in the card is also the logo in the app ID. This logo must be at least 800×320 pixels in size. However, app cards also contain the rating and price of the app in question. In short, app cards are great items that offer a short preview of mobile apps.

Player Cards

Finally, as in every social media channel, we’ll explain a type of card that shows the importance of multimedia content on Twitter. According to statistical data, video-type content attracts great attention from users. In this context, player cards allow you to benefit from this popular format. One of its biggest advantages is that it offers many ways to engage with followers in an interactive way. Their most important disadvantage is that creating them is a somewhat more complex process than others. For this reason, despite its benefits, it is less popular compared to other Twitter cards. The main factor that makes creating them more complicated is that the videos must comply with the terms of the platform. We may list these features as follows:

• Videos must be;
  • H:264
  • BP (Baseline Profile)
  • Level 3.0
  • Video dimensions up to 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second (fps)
• Audios must be;
  • AAC
  • Low Complexity profile

Player cards will help you to have a stronger engagement with the audience. So, which usages are best suited for a player card? First, this way, you can share the most crucial parts of your podcasts if you are publishing them on any platform. Besides, brands may also share video clips, making them more interesting this way. We may also include product videos of both brands and businesses dealing with e-commerce. Player cards are also perfect for users who want to highlight sessions such as Q&A events. Finally, player cards are also quite suitable for users who want to share insights about brand events in an engaging way.

So far, we have explained all the twitter card types. So, do you have the slightest idea how to create them? If your answer is no, just keep reading.

How to Add Twitter Cards

Let’s start by noting that there is no way to implement Twitter cards in the UI. However, there is another solution that you can apply instead. In this method, users add a code to the content while creating the card. To do this, you should use the Twitter card meta tags. Add the appropriate one of these tags as codes to your web page’s metadata. In this way, once you upload your web page to any tweet, the platform will automatically recognize this code in the metadata. Using Twitter website cards makes it very easy to prepare a post. All you have to do is add the URL of the website you will share in the tweet. After the platform recognizes the code in the metadata of this website, it’ll organize and share it as a Twitter card appropriate to the code.

It is even easier to perform this process on websites built on a CMS. It will be enough to install a plugin on your website. Doing so will allow you to perform this process with a few simple clicks. So, you don’t have to manually encode the Twitter card meta tags into your website’s metadata. If you use Twitter cards frequently, we strongly recommend that you get one of these plugins that suits you best. You can be sure that they will greatly alleviate your work.

Twitter Cards, In Short

Social media has dominated every aspect of our lives. These channels are identified with life for every individual from young to old and for every brand from individual to corporate. As such, it is very important to get ahead of others by sharing posts that will attract more attention on social channels. There are different methods for each social network to accomplish that. In this article, we have discussed Twitter, which is one of the most important. Twitter cards offer important opportunities for your posts to stand out. For you to evaluate these opportunities more clearly, we have explained the Twitter card types in detail. At the same time, we have mentioned Twitter card examples in some parts of this article. We hope these examples were successful in making Twitter cards more understandable for you.