Under normal circumstances, when you tweet your blog posts, they appear as just a link on twitter. To get more out of your tweets, you can integrate Twitter Cards into your blog post. Twitter Cards make your blog tweets more appealing to your followers. As a result, you get more traffic to your WordPress blog from Twitter.
Here is an image showing you how a blog post with and without Twitter Cards looks like on Twitter.
The top tweet is for a blog post where Twitter Card is not implemented. The tweet at the bottom is for a blog post where Twitter Card is implemented and approved by Twitter. Yes, it requires Twitter approval. Will cover that later on. Following is what you will see when you click on the “View Summary” link.
As you can see, Twitter displays a large image along with your post title and description to your followers. Use an engaging image, title and description and your followers will definitely click on your link tweet. Many will even Retweet your link to their followers as well.
At the end of the day, by implementing Twitter Cards, you will gain more traffic to your WordPress Blog as your posts are ReTweeted again and again.
How To Start Using Twitter Card on Your WordPress Blog?
So you now want a little bit more traffic to your WordPress blog from Twitter right? Then follow the following steps to get Twitter Card running on your site.
1. Install Yoast WordPress SEO plugin if you have not already done so and Activate it.
2. Open up WordPress SEO’s Social Settings and click on the Twitter tab.
3. Fill up the fields with your Twitter data and select “Summary with large image” as your card type.
That’s all you need to do. Pretty simple right? Now, open up any one of your blog post and verify that your Twitter Card is inded implemented by Yoast WordPress SEO.
Now that your blog is Twitter Card ready, it is time to request for Twitter’s approval. Of course, you will need a twitter account. So if you don’t have one right now, go create it first.
Just provide the validation form with the url of one of your blog post. Verify that you can see the post details as shown in the image above. If you like what you are seeing, then click on the “Request Approval” button. Twitter sends out their approval confirmation via email (the one you registered with on Twitter).
I received my approval within minutes. Immediately after that, I tweeted one post and saw a twitter card for it already.
Should you implement Twitter Card? Well, if you are currently Tweeting out your blog posts on Twitter, you might as well do this. It should improve your click rates on Twitter.
In November 2013, a HubSpot A/B testing found that tweets with images received a 36% increase in clicks, a 41% increase in retweets and a 55% increase in leads.
Have you implemented Twitter Card on your WordPress blog? Are you seeing improved traffic from Twitter? Share your experience with Twitter Card with us in the comments.