How I activated Twitter Cards for Netmediablog

Just like I mentioned in one of my previously published article on this blog titled “Social SEO – How to optimize a website for optimum Social SEO”, Twitter Cards make it possible to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. There are several types of cards for displaying different types of multimedia contents.

Summary Card: Default card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.

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.

These different types of card can be attached to Tweets; it’s easier to attract attention when a tweet has an image or any other supported multimedia format attached to it.

How to Create Twitter Cards:

Creating a Twitter card for your site/blog will allow links to your site to be more informational when tweeted. This will also give your site a professional edge on Twitter. Twitter users often get link-blinded since there are lots of links and hashtags on the timeline, but using a Twitter card will help display your tweets with more details and even with a multimedia (image/video). Twitter cards can allow users play videos with your tweet, an image associated with a tweet could raise a user’ curiosity to check out the full content on your site.

Creating Twitter cards does not necessarily require you to understand fully the generic Meta tags or even how to implement it on your pages especially if you already have the WordPress SEO Plugin installed for your site. Simply go to the Social tab of the WordPress SEO and add your Twitter username under Twitter. This Plugin will handle the content attribution and URL crawling of your site. The attribution is of two types, the website attribution (which indicates the Twitter account for the website) and the Creator attribution (which indicates the person that created the content). The URL crawling determines which URLs to display cards for and which not to.

So after deciding which type of Twitter card best suits your site, head over to the Card Preview Utility to preview your Twitter card, if you are sure your Twitter Card META tags are in place and displays well in the preview, then the next step will be to apply for approval. Click here to fill the Twitter Cards approval form.

It took a while to get my Twitter Cards approved; I actually applied on the 14^th February, 2013 and received a mail that it’s been activated on the 30^th of March, 2013. So you have to exercise some patience but it will definitely get approved, my guess is there is a long queue of people like you waiting to be approved and it’s definitely on a first come, first serve basis.

Would you like to see my Blog’s Twitter Cards live in action? Click on the Twitter Button below and click the “Tweet” button, then head over to your Twitter account and click on the view summary right below the tweet on Twitter.

Will you like to get Twitter Cards for your blog? Simply follow the guides here and apply for yours. Do you have any questions, use the comment form below to ask. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.