Twitter marketers have their work cut out for them these days. Hundreds of millions of tweets are sent on a daily basis, and it’s tough to push your way through all the noise. This is especially true if you’re limiting yourself to 140 characters, but thankfully you don’t have to do that anymore.

Twitter cards offer the ability to expand your tweets beyond text when you share your content. By providing Twitter with meta data via your web site, users will have the option of clicking a “View Summary” link to get more information about your content.

Twitter Card Sample
A summary card, for example, lets you grab people with a headline, intro, and image.

From Expanded Content to Leads

These cards have been available for some time, but now there’s one that caters specifically to the online marketing crowd: Lead Cards. The current set of cards available to Twitter users offers a free way to let users see enhanced information without having to leave Twitter. Lead cards, on the other hand, operate in the same space as Twitter Ads. You don’t have to modify your web site to get them up and running and they provide an immediate conversion point for users on Twitter.

Lead Cards are simply an expansion of your promoted tweets and are billed on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis. You create your card, attach it to a promoted tweet, then wait for the leads to roll in. Leads can be downloaded directly from Twitter or passed to a number of third-party tracking tools.

Lead Cards look similar to tweets with a summary card, but they include a button with custom text to let a user submit their information.

Twitter Lead Card Sample
Users are just one click away from providing a lead.

Lead Limitations

Lead Cards are a quick and easy way to set up a simple lead generation program, but it’s not without trade-offs. The one-click operation of their ads means users won’t enter any information on their own. Twitter will only provide you with their full name, e-mail address, and twitter user name. Getting the rest of that information will depend on your lead nurturing process. The cards are very easy to set up, so it’s certainly worth giving them a try to see how their cost-per-lead stacks up against your other marketing efforts.