I’ve seen expanded tweets, where there’s a link to “view photo” and “view summary” in the bottom right of the post. I didn’t realize you could add this feature to your tweets using Twitter cards.

This article on Hubspot.com inspired me to try it: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/twitter-cards-basics.

Below are two examples of different types of Twitter cards. The first is a summary card, and the second a photo card.

I searched for a Wordpress plug-in to add Twitter Card metadata to a post, and I found this plug-in: http://wpdeveloper.net/free-plugin/twitter-cards-meta/.

To install it, go to your WordPress dashboard to Plugins > Add New, then do a search for “Twitter Cards Meta” and you’ll find the plugin. Install the plugin and activate it.

Go to Settings > Twitter Cards Meta and enter you settings there. I used the following:

Now, when you open your most recent post you’ll notice in the bottom right column a place to add a featured image, and also a box to check for your Twitter Card type. I selected Photo because I really like that one. Then, publish your post.

Then, you have to go to Twitter and ask to be approved:  https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator . Just paste the link of your website in the box, and then you’ll be directed to a page where you ask for your domain to be whitelisted. Once you’ve filled that out, you will get a response right away from Twitter telling you that you’ve been approved.

Once I got the email from Twitter, I went back to the Card Validator page and entered the url for my website, and this was the preview I was given (this is the featured image for my home page, and also the default image url I pasted into the plugin settings).

Then, to test my post twitter card, I copied the url of my new post into the card validator to make sure my featured image was showing.

Now, you are ready to tweet your first Photo Card on twitter.  Go to twitter and paste the url of your new blog post into a tweet and your Twitter card will be there!

Here’s the tweet of my post, along with the expanded photo card.