How to use Twitter App Cards to get more downloads

Here’s an interesting app promotional tool from Twitter which hasn’t had much publicity. It’s a great mobile-specific way to advertise your apps more effectively on social media, and it’s really easy to do!

The background

In April, Twitter introduced new Card formats. Basically, cards are multimedia attachments which pop up in your Twitter feed and let you include nicely formatted images, links, and content.

The most relevant one for us is the ‘App Card’. This displays information about your app within your Tweet, including the app icon, the rating, the first few lines of the description, and most importantly, a link to download it directly from the relevant app store.

How it works

Here’s the really great bit – to get one of these cards into your tweets, all you need to do is paste in the link to download your app from the App Store or Google Play! Twitter will automatically detect all of the information about the app, and then turn your link into a nice little card with a download link right at the bottom.

Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a nice big call to action at the bottom, which links directly to the App Store on your phone.

This currently only works on Twitter’s iOS and Android mobile apps, but Twitter do also have a version of these App Cards on the web, which links to the online iTunes store instead of the mobile download link.

Here’s what that looks like:

The App Cards actually allow for even more functionality than this, as they also let you deep-link within your app, which is a very interesting new way to promote content via social networks. Look out for a post on that here soon.