Twitter Cards: Mission Accomplished

If you've been keeping track of my personal mission to teach myself how to implement Twitter Cards into my Blogger site, you may recall that I was concerned about the low number of resources that I found to be helpful towards completing my task. After posting Part II of this series, I'm happy to say that a few new resources were discovered and proved to be just what I needed.

RECAP OF WHY

In additional to the educational benefits of teaching myself about Twitter Cards, I really wanted to gain the social media benefits that come with gaining this new skill. Everyone knows that photos included in social media posts help drive up responses to said posts. Think about it ... which posts do a better job of catching your attention as you zip through your social media feeds? The posts that feature photos, right? And that's what I wanted - particularly with my tweets.

WHAT I NOTICED

I share a lot of links to articles that I find to be helpful or interesting. I noticed that when sharing links from a major website, my tweets would feature a summary of the article along with a photo. Like this:

Why Do We Like #Brands As Much As We Like People? | http://t.co/lqh8OMg7X2 | http://t.co/tC1hoqSJ8s

— Nick Baggett (@Nick_Baggett) June 19, 2015

Naturally, these types of posts produced better interaction stats than my posts that included links to my blog, which featured no such summary or photo.

I tried to compensate by including a photo file with my tweets (that promoted my blog posts) that I scheduled through Hootsuite but that did not produce the desired result. I mean, it did...but it wasn't the same.

Double Dipping Days Over for Voice Acting Celebrities? http://t.co/OMzCl6g2ah http://t.co/v9HL1vukBk pic.twitter.com/RvXFVnApJ9

— Nick Baggett (@Nick_Baggett) June 25, 2015

This method positioned the photo above the tweet, includes the photo file as another link within the tweet and features no summary. Again, not exactly what I wanted.

After searching for a solution, I leaned about Twitter Cards and the different kinds of Twitter Cards. I determined that I wanted to add Summary Cards to my Blogger site. As I've mentioned in my previous posts, Blogger's mechanics presented a bit of a challenge for my project - or so I thought.

WHAT DID I DO?

Twitter's developer site actually offers a link to a Blogger user's page that explains how to edit Blogger HTML for the purpose of adding Twitter Cards. Must be legit if Twitter links to it, right? Actually, um...no.

That was a dead end so I conducted a search of my own. I tried many of the suggestions that I came across but none worked as well as the solution I found at this very helpful blog. I simply copied the code found here and pasted it into my Blogger site just as the author instructed (as well as updated the Twitter handles within the code).

The author even provided a link to Twitter's validator, a helpful tool that gives a preview of your Twitter Cards. I gave one of my recent posts a test run through the validator and initially liked what I saw. It seemed the HTML code I plugged into place almost did the trick - nice, large photo...but no summary. Something wasn't quite right and the validator told me so - I was missing a meta description, or so it said. I was sure I was missing a line of code so back to searching I went.

Almost immediately, I came across this post that helped me realized that meta description error was due to a very simple reason: I had not utilized the "Search Description" feature found within the Post Settings that every Blogger user knows about. Duh!

So, I went back into one of my posts, entered some text in the "Search Description" section and....

Here's the latest on my project to teach myself how to implement Twitter Cards on my Blogger site. It's getting good! http://t.co/YvxPbhiaHg

— Nick Baggett (@Nick_Baggett) July 13, 2015

SUCCESS! Just like the FastCompany tweet above, I know the summary card is working because the photo is below the tweet and features a summary. Plus, response to this particular tweet saw a significant rise in clicks.

All in all, this task didn't turn out to be as difficult as I thought. But, I'm glad I took the steps to learn about Twitter Cards on my own. I hope that this, the third post of my series, provided clear details on the steps I took to accomplish my mission. If not, feel free to leave a question in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

{Top Photo: Courtesy}