Twitter Cards for Blogs: How to Set Them Up

Have you heard of Twitter cards?

Are you wondering how you can use them for your business?

To learn about how Twitter cards can be beneficial to your blog, this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast goes deep on the subject.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode you'll discover the different types of Twitter cards available, how to set them up and what to tweak in order to have more customization.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Twitter Cards for Blogs
What is a Twitter card?

A Twitter card is a way for you to add more text and images to your tweets. Twitter cards give you a lot more options than you get with an ordinary tweet.

With a normal tweet, you can upload an image that has to be rectangular. If it isn't, Twitter crops the top and bottom for it to fit. When you create a tweet with an image, the default is displayed on Twitter.com and on mobile apps.

Tweets with images do not support Twitter cards. They are completely separate.

Twitter cards work similarly to how Facebook pulls in default information from a post when you paste a URL into Facebook. It pulls in an image, a headline and some text.

Listen to the show to hear why I believe Twitter cards only work on Twitter.com and their own mobile app right now.

How a Twitter card works

If you go to Twitter.com and go to a Twitter account that has Twitter cards enabled, you'll see the option to View Summary in the bottom right of the tweet.

With Twitter's mobile app, you have to click on the tweet to see the Summary card. You'll hear the advantages and disadvantages of this one-click process.

One of the benefits you get with a Twitter card is the amount of content you can add. You get 70 additional characters for the title, and 200 additional characters for your description.

When you click on View Summary in a tweet, you'll notice that below the tweet is where your additional content appears. There's also the ability to include images.

You can even include tall images. For example, I was able to display an image that was 480 x 580 pixels within a Twitter card.

Listen to the show to find out what information you can include and what is powerful if you have a multi-author blog.

Twitter card benefits for bloggers

There are three types of Twitter cards that work well for bloggers. These are the Summary card, the Summary card with large image and the Photo card.

1. The Summary card is the default that most bloggers will likely choose. It shows a small image that's offset to the right, and all text is below it. This is very similar to how Facebook works.

2. The Summary card with large image is a better option if you have nice big images on your blog.

The difference here is that the large image is above the content. When someone hits View Summary, they will see the large image before the additional information you have included.

3. The Photo card is essentially the same as the Summary card with large image, except it doesn't have the summary. Instead you just see the photo with a headline.

To see a Photo card in use, you can check out Mashable on Twitter. At Social Media Examiner, we use the Summary card and we use the Summary card with large image for My Kids' Adventures.

Listen to the show to discover how the images you create for Facebook Open Graph on your blog can also be used for Summary cards.

How to set up a WordPress blog to work with Summary cards

First of all, you need to install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.