In January, I mentioned that I added these newfangled things called “Twitter Cards” onto the FCS website (which is shorthand for adding code and testing it on Twitter’s Developers site. Then in May I finally got around to explaining why it was important to optimize your site’s metadata for social.
If you use Twitter on a regular basis or if you keep on top of tech news, you’d know that Twitter has now defaulted to having Twitter Cards expanded by default on mobile. If you only use twitter.com, you wouldn’t see a difference, but now on mobile when a link on a Twitter Cards-whitelisted site is shared without an image, it looks significantly different.
With this change, Twitter is catching up to Facebook’s use of rich media in links (via the Open Graph protocol (OP metadata)).
As with everything else, if you’re a publisher (anyone with a website/blog) who relies on social media outreach or a CMS provider you’ll eventually need to catch up to what giants like WordPress have been doing for a while. That is, until Facebook takes over publishing entirely.
With visual content garnering more engagement and conversions that plain text, I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter brings the change to Twitter.com sooner rather than later.
Note: Twitter Cards (dev) are different than Website Cards (ads)
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