Increase your website traffic and engagement with Twitter Cards

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You may notice when you click on a tweet in your timeline that links to an article, you get a short summary of what the post is about.

Twitter Card

This is a Twitter card.  This powerful tool allows website administrators flexibility in displaying content by adding additional text or media to their posts in an effort to increase the chance for engagement.

Twitter cards provide many benefits:

  • Call to action: Each link associated with a Twitter card adds a ‘View Summary’ call to action that prompts users to expand into conversation view, showing the highlighted data and interactions.
  • Allows you to stand out: Most sites are still not using Twitter cards (though they should be!). This allows your content to be set apart from the crowd.
  • Higher click through rate (CTR): The average CTR on Twitter is anywhere from .5% to 3%. Twitter cards allow visual images to be attached to ‘shareable’ content. On Facebook, that can increase the likelihood of engagement by about 80%. The same is true for Twitter. Images will help your content stand out in the Twitter stream, resulting in more social engagements and increased traffic to your website.
  • Increases your character limit: You get up to 200 more characters to summarize your content in addition to the 140 characters of your tweet.
  • Content attribution: Twitter cards are attached each time the link is used from any account.  Not only does this lend credibility to your content, it will increase followers on your organization’s and author’s account.
  • Mobile app deep linking: In addition to being able to deep link to content within your site, you can add a link which allows users to open content in your app or download your app.
  • Deliver highly qualified web traffic: By providing supplemental content to your tweet, users interested in your content will be further motivated to click through, leading to a higher conversion rate while users who do not want to consume your content will move on.
In addition to adding a summary (with a large or small image) to an article, Twitter has also has cards for photos, video, apps, products, or a gallery. Twitter has also developed a lead generation card which they made available to all advertisers in August. This expands ability to provide a short snippet of additional contact by allowing you to capture user data with the click of a button.
Setting up Twitter cards is simple for any web administrator and developer and absolutely worth the time.  If you use WordPress, be sure to install this great plugin that will add the field for the meta data to each of your posts for you.
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