Using Twitter Cards on WordPress

Twitter Playing CardsYou may have noticed that sometimes when sharing a link on Twitter, an image and page description auto-generates after sharing. These are known as Twitter Cards, and they can be a useful tool for improving appearance and increasing clicks on your Twitter account.

How do I enable Twitter cards with Yoast?

seo-sidebarYoast is our favorite WordPress plugin for search engine and social media optimization for a number of reasons. Among these reasons is just how how easy Yoast makes it to enable Twitter cards. If you have not already installed Yoast, I highly recommend it.

Log into your WordPress blog and Navigate to SEOSocialTwitter. Enable “Add Twitter Card Meta Data” and set the default card to “Summary”. While doing this, I’d recommend enabling your Facebook Open Graph data at the same time, this blog post explains the process quite well.

Next, you’ll need update your user account to include your Twitter handle. Go to Users Your Profile and update the “Twitter Username” field. This will ensure your handle is included in the page’s meta data when shared.

If you’d like to see how your cards will appear without actually sending a tweet, you can use this handy validator: https://cards-dev.Twitter.com/validator.Example of a twitter card

Can I code my own Twitter Card?

You sure can! Twitter has created some pretty useful documentation for creating your own Twitter cards. By using this method you’ll have greater options when it comes to customizing what content appears.

Additionally, there are several card types that Yoast does not support such as a video player or image gallery. If you have a custom need and know some HTML and a little PHP, you could easily create a nice system for auto-generating content from your tweets.

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