Twitter Cards Complete Guide: how to set up, measure, track, validate and drive traffic to your website
The official Twitter definition of Twitter Cards:
With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experience to Tweets that drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpage, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.
Twitter supports following types of cards:
- Summary Card: Title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
- Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but with a prominently featured image.
- Photo Card: A Card with a photo only.
- Gallery Card: A Card highlighting a collection of four photos.
- App Card: A Card to detail a mobile app with direct download.
- Player Card: A Card to provide video/audio/media.
- Product Card: A Card optimized for product information.
Twitter cards setup is very simple:
- Choose a card type you want to implement https://dev.twitter.com/cards/types
- Add the meta tags to your web page https://dev.twitter.com/cards/markup
- Validate your tags with Twitter cards validator https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
Each time you or anyone else tweet your URL, the twitter cards will be automaticaly added to your tweet.
Here is example of Twitter cards for app, we added on Twitter Auto DM new Followers page:
and after you click on View details, tweet details will be expended with more details:
When you specify meta tags, you have an option to specify google play store and apple app store. If user will open tweet from android or iphone, the relevant app link will be shown.
If you are familiar with Twitter Analytics, you can track performance of your twitter cards:
Using Twitter analytics you will be able to see how many tweets had your twitter cards (how many your twitter and in total tweets), number of times your cards were shown (from your tweets and from all tweets), and number of time people clicked on link in yout twitter card (from your tweets and from all tweets). In addition you can see how many installations your cards drove and how many time people retweeted.