The post Twitter Cards, What Are They? appeared first on HostGator Blog | Gator Crossing . Twitter’s advertising platform is still young, but it’s setting itself up to be really strong. It still has plenty of areas for improvement, but if I had to describe Twitter Cards in one word, it would be FANTASTIC! In my personal experiments, Cost Per Engagement is down from $0.50-$1 to $0.05-$0.20. For those of you who don’t know what an engagement is, it’s every-single-action on your ad. This means a click on a link, picture, your profile, retweet, favorite, or reply. With all those ways for people to engage, you unfortunately do sometimes pay for things you don’t want; in the advertising world, that’s lost money! With Twitter cards, you can create a clear Call to Action (CTA) with less characters and less channels to engage. I’ll explain each of these cards below: LeadGen Twitter Card This is geared towards email marketers. If you build your list or are just thinking about building your list, then these are an easy way to do so. You can set it up where you can download email data or have it sent to your CRM such as Mailchimp or Salesforce. There’s a small list of CRMs that Twitter says are compatible with Twitter Cards , but if your CRM can receive POST data, then you “should” be fine. Don’t quote me on that, though. These LeadGen cards can be used in many ways. You can capture their email and send them to a page to download an ebook or a special landing page on your site. If you have an autoresponder setup with your CRM, you can automatically send them a coupon code or digital product via email as soon as they click your call to action and agree to give you their email address. Either way, you now have their email address to be able to market to them later. But DON’T SPAM! NOTE: You will need to have a privacy policy on your site that you can link to. Almost every email marketer should know this and have one on their site. If not, you can review HostGator’s Privacy Policy as an example. Website Twitter Cards These are quickly becoming my favorite. You know those links you have in your tweet for either your website / landing page or picture? GONE! You can now insert a picture and that becomes the link. Granted, it’s probably a lot smaller of a picture than you want, and the dimensions are a pain to work with, but if I can decrease character space and increase effectiveness, then I’m all for it. I’ve seen campaign engagement go up from 1%-3% to 10-20% and I couldn’t believe it! I certainly recommend trying these out in your strategy if you haven’t already. Personally, I think they need to add some more CTAs other than “Read More” because people won’t just use this for website views. They’ll want more strong signals to buy or download. Hopefully this feature will come soon enough. While I’ve been impressed with the results I’ve seen thus far, it’s always worth noting that early adopters usually see better numbers than those that begin to use it after the first wave of users. And as with all marketing efforts, a large part of it is simply finding your niche . Have you started to use the Twitter Cards? If so, tell us about your results in the comments below. web hosting