Twitter Cards: Teach Myself

When faced with the task of learning a new skill or technique over the course of my career, I've benefited from lots of training. But I've also had a lot of success in teaching myself - Google search and instructional videos on YouTube have been helpful (and quick) tools used to increase my knowledge.  

Twitter cards have been around for a few years now and for just as long I've been aware that I need to know more about them. I want to learn how I can implement Twitter cards on the sites I manage, including this blog. Learning about Twitter cards is something I want to do on my own so in this post, I'm going share more details about why I want to do this and how I plan to do this. 

WHAT ARE TWITTER CARDS?

We all know that fans and followers respond much more to social media posts that feature images. Twitter cards take that notion to the next level by allowing users to feature media within your tweet. The following text taken from Twitter's blog provides a much better explanation:

With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experience to Tweets that drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpage, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.  

The Tweet below shows a Player Card below the 140 characters:

Connect & discover: The Twitter story in 1:40 http://t.co/TRRiDAbkUR

— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) November 8, 2013

HOW WILL I LEARN?

I'll be spending a lot of time reading the previously-mentioned Twitter blog. I've also already done enough Google searches to learn that adding Twitter cards to a Blogger site requires a few extra steps. Unfortunately, I've only one tutorial on YouTube to help with this process but it's such a poor quality that some of the articles I've come across are more helpful. 

I'll study up before I take any action. My early understanding is that there are multiple variations of Twitter cards and each alter the way your tweet displays the extra media. I'll provide an update on my progress in one of my future posts. Feel free to leave any suggestion in the comments!

UPDATE: Read Part II of this series here. Part III can be found here.