A Twitter card gives your tweet more real estate by automatically displaying an image and description when a URL from your blog is shared.
There are various online sources for Twitter statistics and all of them agree that tweets with images gain more exposure and attention. Media Scientist and author, Dan Zarrella, determined tweets that include an image are “94% more likely to be retweeted”
Buffer.com shared the shared their research in a blog post entitled “How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and Favorites”.
With those statistics, adding visuals to tweets is a no-brainer!
You can set up Twitter cards with some manual coding or by using a WordPress plugin to do the work for you. In this post, I will provide instructions on using the free Yoast SEO plugin to automatically insert the meta data.
Installing Yoast
If you don’t have Yoast SEO, you can install it by going to “Plugins → Add New” from your dashboard
Search for “Yoast”, download and install.
Setting Up Twitter Cards in Yoast
1. Go to SEO in your dashboard and click “Social”, then open the “Twitter” tab.
2. Click to Enable “Add Twitter card meta data” option
3. Choose your card type to display, either Summary or Summary with large image.
4. Save Changes
Summary Card – This is the default card. It includes a title, description, and small image.
Summary Card with large image – This is the same as the basic summary card, with some additional information and a larger image.
Twitter Card Validator
Next, you can head over to the Twitter Card Validator, at “https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator” to preview how your card will look when shared on Twitter.
For Example:
Now, any time you, or someone else, tweets a link to your content, the Twitter card will go right along with it.
There are two other types of free Twitter cards, which are not currently supported by Yoast SEO:
1. App Cards, which help promote applications and increase installations.
2. Player Cards, which enable to include rich media, such as video and audio clips.
I will be sharing more information how to use these types of cards in the future.
