Twitter Cards

Updated on Fri, 2014-02-28 23:25

Introduction

Twitter Cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a "card" added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.

Cards drive engagement from your Tweets

There are 7 Card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter's web and mobile clients:

  • Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
  • Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but offers the ability to prominently feature an image.
  • Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo Card.
  • Gallery Card: A Tweet Card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos.
  • App Card: A Tweet Card for providing a profile of an application.
  • Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player Card.
  • Product Card: A Tweet Card to better represent product content.

They can be extended with:


A "summary" Twitter Card on twitter.com with content attribution.

Measure results of your Cards

To complement the Twitter Card platform, analytics reveal how you can improve key metrics such as URL clicks, app install attempts and Retweets.

Click here to learn more about measuring your Twitter performance with Twitter Card analytics.

How Cards Work

Twitter Cards are powered by meta tags that you add to your website. For each URL on your site, you can have a unique Card associated with it.

When somebody tweets a URL with Card meta tags, Twitter's web crawler will fetch the Card from your website and store it in the Twitter cache.

To learn more about how the meta tags and our web crawler works, please check out Getting Started.

Four simple steps

Ready to get started with Cards? In most cases, it takes less than 15 minutes to implement.

  1. Review the documentation for the type of card you want to implement.
  2. Add the pertinent meta tags to your page.
  3. Run your URLs against the validator tool to be approved.
  4. After approval, tweet the URL and see the Card appear below your tweet.
  5. Use Twitter Card analytics to measure your results.

Please note that approval for the Player Card and the Product Card may take additional time to approve.

We hope you enjoy using Twitter Cards, and if you have any questions, drop us a line on the Twitter Cards Forum. Thanks, and happy coding!