Twitter Cards are everywhere at the moment and there’s a good chance you may not have even noticed them.
Twitter Cards “make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets.” Essentially, when you share a link it means rather than just a plain link, you can provide users with the ability to preview the content you’re sharing. An example of a Twitter Card taken from the @Real_CSS_Tricks‘ profile can be seen below. Note the additional content between the standard Tweet content and the Tweet summary (including retweets & favourites).
There are three different types of card all aiming to highlight content in different ways:
Summary Cards are ideal for news/blog rich posts. They give you space to add the title, description (200 words max), a photo & the option to follow an associated Twitter account.
Photo Cards are perfect for image services as this will allow you to embed a tweet sized photo in a similar fashion to Instagram.
Player Cards are suitable for video & audio services and, in a similar style to the Photo Cards, allow a player to be embedded (at the size of the Tweet stream).
As it stands, Twitter Cards aren’t presently available for all users. However, Twitter are “currently are in the process of slowly rolling out the technology to 100% of users“.
To find out more about Twitter Cards head over to the official developer documentation.