How to add muscle to your tweets

You no longer have to restrict yourself to 140-character tweets. The Twitter card now gives you the option to expand your tweets.

All that you need to do is to integrate the right Twitter card with your tweet. The Twitter card will display the summary of your article, showcase your product photograph or display the video summary. The extra information that is displayed increases the chances of your tweet getting clicked, and the user landing on your website.

The six kinds of cards that Twitter has developed and which can be deployed now are:

1. Summary Card
The Summary card inserts the title of the post/article, thumbnail image and a brief description. The Twitter user has the option to Hide/View summary. The Twitter card also provides a thumbnail and a clickable hyperlink View on Web at the base of the summary.

2. Large Image Summary Card
With a large image summary card you can display a bigger image on top of your summary. The bigger image increases the chances of the reader taking interest in your web content. The image size specified by Twitter is 280 by 150 pixels.

3. Photo Card
This is especially useful for photographers and shutterbugs. They can use the Twitter card to create tweet sized photo cards with their tweets.

4. Gallery Card
This Twitter card allows you to share four photographs with each tweet, giving the user more than one reason to visit your site.

5. App Card
The App Card not only enables you to give the name, description and icon of the app but also to highlight attributes such as the app rating and its price. However, this Twitter Card type is available only for the iOS and Android mobile clients at present.

6. Product Card
The Product Card can be used to showcase your products on Twitter. You can give an image, description, and even highlight some key details about your product with the tweet to drive sales.

Besides this, another Twitter card is the Player card. It is meant for audio and video streaming tweets. Currently, approvals are not being given for this Twitter card.

Visit the Twitter cards page to find out how to deploy these cards.