When to use summary or large Twitter cards?

November 13, 2018

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• Creating Twitter card templates for WordPress
• Creating Twitter cards on Jekyll-generated websites

Now that you have this option to use summary or large summary cards, I personally encourage restraint with large summary cards.

I have noticed that large summary cards are really effective for:

• News articles where the image is of real people (i.e., not actors or models).
• Images where the detail is lost in a summary image.
• Good for capturing interest, particularly for very infrequent tweeters (this covers the technical committee I co-chair).

But large summary cards are sometimes overused. Since I have Twitter set up in reverse chronological order, I have to scroll through large image content to get to other content. Given that, large cards are best used in specific situations. Situations where large summary cards do not work well:

• You only have stock art. The image of Photoshopped robot arms rising out of a corn field is a perenniel favorite describing agricultural automation. Another: the default meeting, where there are people of multiple races, but you can’t tell exactly, because the whole image has been lightened and blurred such that you can barely tell they have facial features. Everyone is wearing light grey, white, or blue.
• You tweet multiple times a day with links from your website, sometimes the same links.
• The detail and complexity of the image is not high, and would have been understandable from a summary-style card.