The new Twitter Cards – what you need to know

Last week, Twitter introduced three new ‘Twitter Cards’: Product, App and Gallery. The Cards expand on Twitter’s existing Summary, Photo and Player Cards. Twitter Cards allow users who tweet links to your content to have a ‘Card’ added to the tweet that’s visible to all of their followers. Twitter Cards are currently being used by more than 10,000 developers, mobile apps, and websites.

What are the new Cards?

The purpose of the three new Cards is to ‘show more types of content on Twitter’. The Twitter Cards enable this to happen in the following ways:

Product Card
When users share a product, the Card will display an image accompanied with a description along with two other key details, such as price and retail location.

App Card
When a Twitter user has linked to an app, the Card will display the app’s description, name and icon. It will also provide the price of the app and its rating.

Gallery Card
A shared article can have up to four images embedded within the tweet.

The Cards also support Twitter’s mobile app deep-linking. If a user tweets from an app, you have the option to view that content from directly within the app. If you don’t have the app, Twitter will encourage you to download it onto your phone directly from the tweet.

What will be the impact of the new Cards?

The Cards will allow brands to attach more information and content to their tweets, enabling a more detailed explanation about the product they want to display. The extra emphasis on visual content will allow brands to be more effective in reaching and appealing to their audience, with this extra media in the Cards driving users to external sites.

More information/helpful reading

Follow this link for more information on the new ‘Twitter Cards’.