Twitter is testing a new ad unit that gives direct marketers a way to generate leads directly from tweets.
You can see an example of the unit in this tweet promoting Twitter’s small business guide. Not only is there a small image promoting the guide, but if you’re logged in, it also shows a “Get it now” button. When you hit the button, you don’t get asked for a phone number or email address — instead, you get a message saying that “Twitter Advertising will reach out soon.” Presumably, the advertiser will get a list of interested Twitter accounts.
Twitter's new ad product allows direct marketers to generate leads directly from Tweets (Click Image To Enlarge)
Twitter says this functionality is being delivered through Twitter Cards, the technology that enables additional media and functionality (like embedding a photo or a video) in tweets. It also says this unit is still being tested. So it could change significantly, or it might not ever see a broad rollout at all. This does seem like something that would be pretty appealing to advertisers, since it gives them a new way to get their messages across, as well as to measure the success of their campaigns in a way that’s more meaningful to them than retweets or clickthroughs to a landing page.
Of course, as with any expansion to Twitter advertising, it could also spur some user whinging. For what it’s worth, this sample doesn’t seem particularly obtrusive to me.
I’ve asked Twitter for more details about the test and will update if I hear back.
COMMENTARY:
Introduction To Twitter Cards
Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a "card" added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.
As a developer, Twitter cards can...
- Give you control of how your content is displayed with Tweets
- Drive traffic to your site
- Increase the number of people following your Twitter accounts through content attribution
Three simple steps
- Review the documentation for the type of card you want to implement.
- Add the meta-tags to your page and test your markup with our preview tool.
- Apply to participate by submitting your working example link and related information.
Card Principles
A "summary" Twitter Card on twitter.com with content attribution.
There are 3 card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter's web and mobile clients:
- Summary: The default card, which includes a title, description, thumbmail image, and Twitter account attribution.
- Photo: A Tweet sized photo card.
- Player: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.
The summary card can be used for many kinds of web content, from blog posts and news articles, to products and restaurants. The screenshot below shows the expanded Tweet view for a New York Times article:
Summary Card as it appears on the desktop and mobile devices (Click Image To Enlarge)
The card is designed to give the reader a preview of the content before clicking through to your website. You’ll notice that this card makes use of all of the properties described in the previous section: URL, title, description, and image.
Photo Card
The photo card puts the image front and center in the Tweet:
Photo card as it appears on the desktop (Click Image To Enlarge)
Photo card as it appears on mobile devices (Click Image To Enlarge)
To define a photo card experience, set your card type to "photo" and provide a twitter:image. Twitter will resize images, maintaining original aspect ratio to fit the following sizes:
- Web: maximum height of 375px, maximum width of 435px
- Mobile (non-retina displays): maximum height of 375px, maximum width of 280px
- Mobile (retina displays): maximum height of 750px, maximum with of 560px
Twitter will not create a photo card unless the twitter:image is of a minimum size of 280px wide by 150px tall. Images will not be cropped unless they have an exceptional aspect ratio. All images will be fetched and proxied by Twitter to ensure a high quality of service and SSL security for users.
Specifying the width and height using twitter:image:width and twitter:image:height helps us more accurately preserve the aspect ratio of the image when resizing.
Photo cards are the only type of card which support a blank title.
Animated gifs are currently not supported in Twitter Cards.
Player Card
The player card is for interactive media experiences like videos, music players, and live streaming events, and allows you to present your content inside of an iframe within the Tweet. Unlike the photo and summary card, you control the entire content experience, and are responsible for providing an implementation that works across Twitter clients including:
- Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com
- Twitter for iPhone
- Twitter for Android
Photo card offers a different experience on the desktop and on mobile devices like tablets (Click Image To Enlarge)
Due to platform capabilities, player cards work a bit differently on each client and it’s important to understand these details before you begin building your card experience. All player cards require special whitelisting and approval by Twitter.
A few simple rules for Cards
Do:
- Build a responsive and equivalent experience that works within all Twitter Clients. Cards that do not work in all Twitter clients listed above will not be approved.
- Test your experience on the native browsers of Twitter Clients before submitting for approval.
- Provide a raw stream to video and audio content when possible.
- Use HTTPS for your iframe, stream, and all assets within your card.
- Use wmode=opaque if utilizing Flash for the twitter.com experience, so that the player renders at the correct z-index.
- Link to a HTML page which falls back to mobile friendly content in case Flash is not available.
Do not:
- Generate mixed content browser warnings. All Twitter clients use HTTPS, and you must not break the lock of the browser.
- Automatically play content.
- Require users to sign-in to your experience.
- Commingle sharing features from other networks inside your player.
- Set twitter:player to point directly at a .swf movie file.
A few things to check before submitting a Player Card for approval.
These are the most common problems we find when reviewing Player Card submissions (these will delay your approval until fixed):
- The HTTPS lock is broken, make sure the video is served via HTTPS too, no exceptions
- The content must have stop or pause controls
- In Android/iOS browsers the experience must fall back gracefully (sized for mobile viewport, no broken Flash embeds, etc)
- The content must not play automatically
- The content must not implement its own sharing controls to third party networks (we do not support this currently)
- The content must not require sign in
- The content must not be entirely an ad
- The player URL must not point directly to a .swf
- Check if the player's z-index causes the content to overlap the page header
- If the browser asks you whether you want to display insecure assets, you have an https problem
- Make sure the image is at least 68,600 pixels (a 262x262 square image, or a 350x196 16:9 image) or bigger
- The player URL is not HTTPS (did we mention this before?)
Twitter cards and Open Graph
You'll notice that Twitter card tags look similar to OpenGraph tags, and that's because they are based on the same conventions as the Open Graph protocol. If you're already using OpenGraph to describe data on your page, it’s easy to generate a Twitter card without duplicating your tags and data. When the Twitter card processor looks for tags on your page, it first checks for the Twitter property, and if not present, falls back to the supported Open Graph property. This allows for both to be defined on the page independently, and minimizes the amount of duplicate markup required to describe your content and experience.
Twitter Cards Guidelines For Developers
The documentation for Twitter Cards for developers is available HERE.
Courtesy of an article dated February 19, 2013 appearing in TechCrunch
Twitter wanted to catch up with social media giants like facebook and so they are looking for ways to improve communication between people. Advertising is their main goal for making this but its efficacy remains to be seen.
Posted by: Homer Roberts | 02/27/2013 at 10:24 PM