How to use Twitter to promote your website

Introduction:

The term ‘Twitter ad’ is pretty ambiguous, as it can refer to any post to Twitter with a paid boost. There are different types of ads including promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts. For this post, we’re talking about creating a Twitter website card to specifically promote your website. This tactic can be used to promote your main corporate site, your investor relations site, or a site you’ve created for a special campaign. Whatever your goal is, read below for some tips on how to create the perfect website card.

First thing’s first: what in the world is a website card?

A Twitter website card is a type of ‘Twitter card’, or a tweet that contains an image and a call to action button that helps direct a user to where you want them to go. With a website card, the goal is a specific URL. Brendan Zhang, a member of Twitter’s small business team, wrote that “website cards work to turn ordinary tweets into a creative showcase of your website”.

The best part about them is that they’re actually free to use! It’s your choice whether or not to put money behind a card and promote it. That’s where website cards turn into promoted Twitter ads.

Anatomy of a website card

A Twitter website card has four main components: a headline, a 800×320 image, a call-to-action button and the URL of the website you’re driving traffic to. We’re going to break down each element and give you some tips on how to capitalize on every space you’re given.

Here’s an example of a Twitter website card with its main parts (the URL is included with Call To Action button):

Twitter website card

70 character headline

This is where you want to be catchy, catchy, catchy. Or where you directly explain the benefit a user gets when clicking onto your site. Here are some tips when writing a website card headline:

  1. Don’t use all 70 characters if you don’t absolutely have to. Be short and sweet, but still get your message across.
  2. The headline should state exactly what a user gets by clicking that button. Misleading info will just frustrate everyone.
  3. You can choose to accompany the website card with a 140 character tweet. If you do this, don’t repeat information in both the tweet and the card headline. Always give something new.
  4. Seriously. Be concise. Brevity is the soul of wit. And yep, that was a little Shakespeare for you.

 Card image

The image is arguably the most important part of the card. So do your research! Here are some tips in the meantime:

  1. No ambiguous images. Choose one that directly connects with your headline and the website you’re directing people to.
  2. Triple check that the image you chose is high-quality and the right size, or things will get fuzzy and you’ll look unprofessional.
  3. Consider creating an image that has some words included. Take a look at our example above of our winged ‘IR Champ’ logo.
  4. People like to see images of other people interacting with what you’re offering. Example: if you’re a surfboard company, choose a high-quality image of someone overjoyed to be on a surfboard instead of an image of a lonely surfboard lying in the sand.

Call-to-action button

This is where you get them to actually click. Unfortunately with a Twitter card you can’t write your own call to action, but we’d argue that’s the right way to do it. This way you’re forced to be more concise, and as we’ve learned, that’s good. Twitter provides you with almost 20 different options, such as ‘learn more’, ‘visit now,’ ‘register now’, and ‘subscribe’. Time for a few tips!

  1. If you’re promoting your company or investor website, ‘visit now’ is a safe bet. You can also consider creating a Twitter website card for a specific part of your site like a page where users subscribe to your email newsletter.
  2. Again, make sure all parts of the card are connected and make sense. The image needs to relate to the headline which needs to relate to the call-to-action word.

 Website address/URL

This part is straightforward. Make sure you’re including the right URL, especially if it’s for a subsection of your main website.

  1. Triple check your link before you publish the website card. No one likes a broken link, especially if you’re promoting the ad with some dollars.

Final Thoughts:

  1. Try some free website cards first before putting any real money behind them. Test them with your followers to see if the headline makes sense and the image is eye-catching.
  2. Always make sure your Twitter website cards are up-to-date if you’re running them in an ad. Don’t launch a card and forget about it, because as long as you’re paying for it, it will still be out there.
  3. Even if your ad campaign is running for a long time, swap up the images and content. Keep it new and fresh so your audience won’t glaze over the same ad.

Marika Hirsch
Marika Hirsch

As Blender’s Content Manager (aka ‘Resident Wordsmith’) Marika enjoys bringing readers the latest and greatest in both digital trends and IR tips. Follow along on Twitter: