Twitter: a great friend of online retailers
At a developers conference on Tuesday it announced three new Twitter card types, one of which is directly aimed at online retailers (the initial three types were introduced in mid-2012). The social network also introduced mobile app deep linking.
But what exactly does that mean and how can you benefit?
Last June, Twitter introduced it’s ‘cards’ or ‘expanded Tweets’ functionality. By adding some extra code to your site, when people tweeted anything from your page they appeared not as the usual small 140 character tweets, but larger tweets including images and extra information.
These ‘cards’ came in three types: summary, photo and player. Summary allowed content creators to have any tweets of their articles include and headline, standfirst and photo. Photo allowed a photo accompaniment and player a video or audio clip.
The latest additions to the card options are app, gallery and product. As you might imagine, the product card is what has the ecommerce professionals excited. The announcement included a number of launch partners to kick off the new cards including online marketplace Etsy and retailers Jawbone and Wine Library.
The product card expands any tweets about your products to include a picture and description along with two other fields of information decided by the retailer such price, reviews or product location. Twitter describes it as ‘a great way to better represent retail items on Twitter, and to drive sales.’
How the Product card will appear on Twitter including mobile version
The other cards might also be useful for ecommerce professions – if you have an app the app card will push downloads of your app through tweets which include info on your app and allow you to download it in one click.
Gallery allows your tweet is display up to four images which could be useful for new product launches or photo heavy blogs.
How do you use Twitter cards?
Each page on your site can only have one type of card capability. You must chose which pages you want to add cards to and which ones to apply to each of them.
There is a bit of HTML which must be added to the HEAD section of your pages in order to activate the cards. You can find this code on the under Cards Markup Tag Reference. It will look something like this:
The integration of the card onto your pages must be checked by Twitter before it will work through the Validator Tool.
Mobile app deep linking
This is only relevant if you have an app which you want to encourage your customers to download or use more often.
When browsing Twitter on a mobile device, users will be able to click on a link in your expanded tweets or cards and view the content of the tweet on your app. If they haven’t downloaded your app they will be directed to the app store with the option to download it with one click.
Twitter says the new feature ‘closes the loop between content creation, content discovery and app downloads’.
“One of the most important features in the new Cards is the ability to allow users to download your app (if the user doesn’t already have it installed), or deep-link into your own app (if the app is already installed on the user’s mobile device).
The ability to enable app installs and deep-linking is globally available across all Twitter Card types – you’ll just need to add a new set of markup tags,” says the announcement on Twitter’s developers site.
Social commerce is still finding its feet but Twitter’s latest move has put it up there with Facebook and Instagram in terms of product visibility.
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