With a packed house in Twitter’s employee cafeteria Tuesday night, the company announced an important expansion of “Twitter Cards” — the technology that adds rich content inside a tweet.
These were first called expanded tweets when Twitter launched the feature in June 2012. About four months later, Twitter announced that it already had more than 2,000 partners using the content-rich tweets.
Last night, Twitter told developers that they eventually want to have hundreds of different card types. But for now, there are three new types of Twitter Cards: App, Product and Gallery. Those join the three existing Card types — Summary, Photo and Player/Video.
Here’s a look at the new card types available.
App Card
The App card will give developers the chance to show app information from the App Store or Google Play, including things like description, rating and price. Related to this was a separate announcement about app installs and deep linking, which will give app owners the chance to include links in tweets that say “Get this app” (if the user doesn’t already have it installed) or “View in our app.”
Flickr was one of the partners that spoke at last night’s event, and showed off how it’s integrating this card in tweets that feature Flickr images.
Gallery Card
While the existing Photo card lets an image show directly in a tweet, the new Gallery card can show up to four smaller images as a preview of a larger photo gallery.
Product Card
To me, this is where it gets really interesting. Merchants can embed product details right inside a tweet — a photo, description and up to two additional aspects of the merchant’s choosing (price, sizes, in stock, etc.). Twitter’s developer page shows an example of this card using a tweet from Etsy:
I don’t see anything in Twitter’s documentation to indicate that an “Add to Cart” button is supported but, as you can see above, the Etsy integration also uses the App Card and has that “Get the Etsy app” link. If the user already has Etsy’s app installed, that link could be “View in Etsy,” which is pretty close to an “Add to Cart” link.
There are some obvious product discovery and shopping opportunities there, but as I watched some of the live tweets from the event last night, I thought Dave McClure made a great observation when he suggested that retailers could combine the new Product card tweets with Promoted Tweets for a much richer experience — richer both in content and potential revenue.
In other words, this Product card — and the App card, too — not only opens up new opportunities for brands and developers to introduce themselves to Twitter users via content-full tweets, but when combined with Twitter’s advertising opportunities, it also gives them more reasons to promote these content-rich tweets. That, of course, helps grow Twitter’s revenue.
And that’s only with six types of Twitter Cards. Imagine if and when Twitter’s comment about wanting hundreds of card types comes to fruition…
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