Did you know you can easily customize your Twitter & Facebook cards (and boost your brand)?
We’re all familiar with how Twitter & Facebook cards make your message more engaging by adding stuff like photos, audio & video. But while the cards seem to have a prescribed look, they are in fact easily customizable.
Customizing your cards can further reinforce your message — and your brand, so it’s surprising that more people aren’t doing it. Let’s look at a couple examples of customized cards to see how it’s done and learn how to get ahead of the curve too.*
How Neon customizes its Twitter & FB cards
Just for reference, here’s what a regular Twitter photo card looks like:
In this National Geographic card you see a 70-character title followed by an image, a 200-character description, and a link to their site. Not bad, you say, not bad!
Now let’s compare it to a customized card made by Neon, a new app that lets you quickly review stuff in your life and share your review with friends:
Well Merlin’s beard! Can you spot the two differences? I’ll give you ten seconds.
1) That’s right! First up is that loud round sticker on the bottom right of the image!
That sticker packs a bunch of information in a simple tweak to the default Twitter card image format. The sticker tells you:
- the reviewer’s rating of the book (9.5/10),
- the reviewer’s feeling about the book (cool happy face emoji)
- the Neon app’s brand (the violet ring incorporated in the sticker is both the Neon logo, and a progress bar — double duty, wow!)
In a millisecond’s glance, readers can absorb way more info from the customized card, thanks to that clever sticker. Neon generates the custom image for each card based on each product review. With some simple code, you can generate your own custom images too, or use a tool like https://imgix.com to generate images on the fly.
Now moving on. Did you guess the second difference between the default Twitter card and the customized Neon card?
2) Yes, it’s the purple link text! Also notice that the link color matches the purple Neon logo. This is an easy way to reinforce your brand by simply changing your Twitter theme colors.
By adding an informative sticker to the image and choosing a text link color that matches their logo, the result is tighter brand control for Neon. Good job! Now let’s continue looking at different examples of custom cards.
Other companies doing custom Twitter & FB cards
Medium
Medium cards feature custom text highlighting. The mint green highlighting clearly makes the quoted text stand out, thus drawing attention to the writing, which is what Medium is all about.
Medium’s text highlighting is well done. It works by generating a custom image based on what you highlight, and then includes that in your tweet or Facebook post. Nice!
Amazon
Amazon’s Twitter cards by and large look like regular cards. However, one exception is the Amazon card for Wirecutter Deals, which includes the Prime logo and the product’s rating at the bottom of the photo. The rating stars and the reviews adds valuable information and a stamp of trustworthiness to the tweet in the fleeting seconds that people scan it.
However, while this card is customized, it looks hastily done. Check out how the bottom of the Prime logo is shaved off in the image. The feet of the rating stars are painfully toeing the slice line too. The positioning of these elements needs improving. Amazon could also have incorporated more of its brand in a better looking sticker. This is the bare minimum of customization. Hmpf!
Why aren’t more people doing custom cards?
While examples of custom cards aren’t abounding, the ones we’ve seen definitely add value to the messages beyond the regular cards, by emphasizing things like key quotes, branding, emotion, and product quality.
I mentioned earlier that few people are doing custom cards, a surprising fact that made me wonder why. WHyYy? Two big reasons could be that:
- people simply aren’t aware that the cards can be tweaked, and
- people are wary of rocking the current climate of homogeneous design
Nonetheless, the power of visual first impressions cannot be overstated, having been proven scientifically in the people realm, and now moving to the UX realm. Companies like Neon, Medium, and Wirecutter Deals are creating a slow momentum in this direction with their cards. It would seem that customizing your own Twitter & Facebook cards to boost your brand is a no-brainer too.
Do you have any other examples of card customizing? I’d love to hear what they are!
* To be clear, I’m only talking here about regular cards, which are free for anyone to use. If you pay the corporate bucks, then Twitter and Facebook advertising cards offer wider creative flexibility.
