Leveraging Twitter, Part 3: Twitter Search & Twitter Cards Tutorial

3.2 Introduction

Hi, I'm Jennifer Evans Cario, President of SugarSpun Marketing, author of Pinterest Marketing: An Hour a Day, and the Social Media Faculty Chair at Market Motive. Thanks for joining me for part 3 in our series on Leveraging Twitter.

3.3 Advanced Search

If you've ever used Twitter to run a search or look for someone, you know that going in and running a search for hashtag or running a search for a user is fairly easy to do. One thing that many marketers haven't fully utilized is the idea of Twitter's Advanced search feature. Now the wonderful thing from the marketing perspective about Twitter's Advanced Search, is that you have so much potential to go in and really narrow down the field of conversation that you receive as part of the search results. Looking at the options of what we can do to include or exclude makes it a little easier to see how you might put advanced search to work as either part of your reputation monitoring or even as part of the research that you do to come up with content generation ideas. So, for example, having the ability to go in and narrow down by including or excluding phrases, and saying okay, I need only the tweets that have every single one of these words. Or I need tweets that have any of these words or this exact phrase. Typing in something like how do I as part of this exact phrase and then pairing it with a variety of words under the any of these words category, is a great way to figure out what people are asking about related to your business so that you can come up with some ideas or articles that you might want to write. Including things like HTTP to compare chats versus resources, because if something includes a link, it's probably pointing to a resource. But if it doesn't include the HTTP, so if you exclude that phrase, then you can find again, people just having conversation, not sharing links or sharing resources. Now you also have the ability to use some advanced search feature on the people front. This is great for competitive research, looking to see what comments people might be directing at your competitors, maybe looking to see who's mentioning them, what they're responding to, what they have to say. Also going in and utilizing the date section to allow you to narrow down the tweets around specific campaigns or events. So if you wanted to do follow-up after South by Southwest to see how many people in a specific area or that we're including a South by Southwest hashtag happened to be talking about a particular product that you may have launched there. Or again, just looking at that time frame starting at South by Southwest and maybe going a month out to check and see during that time frame, how many people were still talking about the ideas and the things that were buzz during South by Southwest.

3.4 Twitter Search Campaign Prep

Now, Twitter search can also be really handy as part of your campaign prep. So, if you remember when Burger King was looking at bringing back chicken fries again, and they did a tour around the United States where they took a chicken and they went to different cities and they did a whole PR stunt where the chicken came and ate out of a bowl and whether she ate out of the yes bowl or the no bowl determined if that city got to have chicken fries for a day. Now as part of doing that campaign and knowing which cities they were going to, it wouldn't have been difficult for the planning agency to have gone out and actually run searches ahead of time for Burger King lovers that were in the area. Finding people who were already posting about Burger King and here's what they love and here's what they don't love and sort of what they have to say is a great way to reach out to some specific Twitter users. Again, once you find those conversations it's very easy then to go find out how many followers do these people have, how active are they, how connected are they, and to potentially do an outreach and issue some specific invites to that event to people who are already in the area. Now the same thing can be done after an event. By going and looking for the people who were tweeting in gleeful celebration. That hey, chicken fries came back, and are they really back to stay, and yes they're back to stay, and who was using the hashtag in specific areas. Because again, you have the opportunity to then reach out with a much more targeted offer or giveaway or opportunity to get involved with something specific.

3.5 Other Uses for Search

Now there's quite a few other uses for Twitter search as well. Setting up search columns in your Twitter client and scanning them on a regular basis is a really great way to be part of again, the reputation monitoring or even just looking for opportunities to get out and answer questions. So, using it for content idea generation, by seeing it in what people have to say. Using it for customer testimonials. Seeing who showed up somewhere, whose posted about it, included a picture, you know, what did they like? Gathering feedback of events after the fact to see, you know, who's talking about a specific location and what happened there. And again, having the ability with advanced Twitter search to narrow that field down by geographic region gives you a lot more opportunity to see what's going on. Also doing things like competitive research, running searches to find out hey, what are people saying about my competitor, what are people saying about the store or the business that's already in this area is I'm getting ready to open up mine. So I can figure out exactly how I'm going to approach things and what type of information I might want to put out there.

3.6 Twitter Cards Overview

Now what are the other advanced, but needed features of Twitter marketing is the concept of Twitter cards, and basically the idea behind Twitter cards is that 140 character restriction even when you add it to an embedded image. It's not always enough to get the job done. So what Twitter was looking to do was add both some native code functionality that can go into your website as well as some functionality within Twitter itself to allow you to set up sort of a more integrated, multimedia, interactive tweet that can go out as part of one of your campaigns or even part of one of your everyday posts.

3.7 Summary Cards

So some of the Twitter cards are part of the code that goes within your website. And much like Rich Pins, or Facebook's Open Graph, you need to do a little bit of work to actually get them integrated into your site. So going over just a couple of the options that are available, one is the idea of summary cards. And summary cards basically provide a content preview before someone clicks through. So instead of just sharing a link and having people say, okay well don't really know what I'm going to get once I click through that. But you know, let's figure it out anyways. Now, you have the opportunity to have a small thumbnail image show up. The title of the web page and a brief description as well as the URL of what page it comes from. Now that's an addition to the 140 character tweet that you're already putting together. So, again there's opportunity to get much more information into that tweet. Now these are great for incorporating with blog posts or heavy content that's on your website.

3.8 Large Photo & Product Cards

Now they also offer what's called a Large Photo Summary Card. And this is basically the exact same thing as a Summary Card, but you have the ability to tie in a much larger photo that's going to run the full width of the Twitter news feed. So as you can see, this is great for visual blog posts. Course, when we look at the type of content that goes out on Twitter, clearly we see a lot of blog posts and news and information. But there's also going to be times where clearly we want to be able to share information about a product. So Twitter also has a feature that's called product cards. And what product cards do is include a product image, description, and then you can actually program in two key features or sort of, you know, descriptive bits of information about the product. And then again it will also show that URL of where it actually comes from. In addition to the description that's going out in your standard 140 character tweet. Now these are great for e-commerce sites. They also tend to be used, you can see the example here by iHeartRadio in terms of, you know, the music and the song that's going out. Anything that's a little more product focused as opposed to content focused is a great fit for product cards.

3.9 Player Cards

Now, there's also the idea of player cards. Now, player cards are designed to have video that's embedded that, users can start to play, as soon as they get to the tweet. So you'll see it incorporated with Vine, or with some native video, or Vimeo or YouTube or other channels like that. Now these do include quite a few rules and restrictions. You need to take the time to go through the rules around player card before you actually implement them on your site. Because again there's some restrictions of the type of content, how long they can be, whether or not they auto play and sort of what the entire experience is. So these are great for media files but again it's a really good idea to take the time to go through the full rules and restrictions. Because this is the one type of card that really does have sort of a little bit of extra added on to it that you need to make sure is okay.

3.10 Enabling Twitter Cards on Your Site

Now to enable Twitter cards most of this is going to be about getting some meta data added into your website code. You also do have to go through a validation process. You can find all the information on enabling Twitter cards your website by going to Twitter's development area and looking under the cards section. Now, if you happen to be a WordPress user, WordPress users can actually make use of a couple of different plug-ins that are designed to help you enable Twitter cards. There's various ones that are out at any point in time. And again, going through the WordPress plugin, running a search. Checking to see which ones happen to be well reviewed and updated at that particular point int time will help out a lot. Now again, whether you go in and have a programmer add them. Or you use something like a plugin on WordPress. You You do need to make sure that you take the time to go through their Twitter Card Validator and actually validate the same way that you would need to do with Pinterest's Rich Pin Process. It's making sure you get that validation in place before they're actually going to start to function and to work.

3.11 Conversion & Campaign Cards

Now there's also non-developer Twitter cards, and these are Twitter cards that you actually build out on Twitter itself. So these are conversion oriented cards that actually match in to Twitter's native analytics. They'll give you some really great data about how people are using and interacting with your cards. You'll notice the example here. It's not just, hey, here's the image, here's the website, but you can see that Learn More button. So it's got a call to action that's incorporated with it. Now, there's Near Instant Set-up. If you've set up a Facebook ad, if you've set up a Twitter ad, or a promoted post on Pinterest, any of those, it's going to be very, very simple for you to do this. You are going to go into your Twitter campaign area, the same place that you would set up an ad and under creatives, you will find a section that says cards. And once you go into the card section, it'll walk you through, there are four different types that you can set up. There's a lead generation card that's going to be designed to pull email addresses in for you. There's website cards that have sort of, again, a call to action of learn more, visit now, shop now to get someone into the site. There's also Basic App and Image App. And these are designed for if you have an app that you're actually selling, this will actually integrate straight into the iTunes store, or the Google Play store, so that if someone happens to be on a mobile device, they can go right in and actually get the app instantly and download it into their system. So, once you've decided which type of card you want to set up, again, it's very similar to the standard social media based advertising we see now. And you're going to go in, you're going to pick your description, you're going to choose an image. You're going to have your call to action, and then you do have to be able to link it to a privacy policy that sits on your website that tells how the data's used. And what Twitter's going to do is any time someone clicks on that Subscribe Now or Learn More, if you're using a lead generation card Twitter is going to open sort of a database that has the email address that's associated with the Twitter account of the person who takes action. So, if I come in and I hit subscribe now, it's going to tie my @JenniferCario Twitter handle to my email address. And it's going to give access to that e-mail address to the company that's running the lead generation card. So, making use of these and doing things like pinning them to your profile so that as people come in to see you they can choose to subscribe to maybe an email account that you've got set up. Maybe you want to have them subscribe to the newsletter that you have put together. Again, pinning that to the top of your page gives you a great and instant call to action. Especially if you take the time to customize your header and to have your header sort of working in conjunction with that. Now it's a really easy way to get the email addresses gathered. Lead generation cards will save those email addresses into a .csv file. So you can download them, you can integrate them with whatever email program you happen to be using. If you're using something like MailChimp to actually automatically integrated and you can just sync your accounts together and it will create sort of a new group within your MailChimp account that has access to all of those particular emails.

3.12 More Ways to Leverage Cards

Now, there's quite a few ways to leverage Twitter cards when you're really sit down and start to get creative about it. But what you really want to do at the core is consider what value propositions you can offer in exchange for a targeted email contact and how you might then leverage that email contact down the road. So maybe that's giving people access to free or discounted tools. You might put together some resources or curated content that they've got the option to subscribe to. Again, if you're doing targeted email newsletters or mailing lists, great way to put that together. And then also things like white papers and ebooks, studies, data, and using that as part of your lead generating process can also be really effective. Coming up in the next part of our series, we're going to start to get down to the nitty gritty of building a Twitter marketing strategy, looking at what that process looks like and the questions you need to ask yourself as you come up with your plan. We're going to break it down into the four key areas of marketing that Twitter really can have an impact. And we're also going to talk a little bit about why you need to really give careful consideration to automation before you put that into play as part of your Twitter strategy. Thanks so much for joining me for this part in our Twitter series

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