Recently I was wondering why some tweets had extra graphic images in them. It looked like someone had figured out how to create a tweet from a blog post and include first image from the post in the tweet. That looked pretty cool. Here is an example.
There are two tricks here. The first trick is configure Jetpack to publicize your post via Twitter. With Jetpack you can publicize your posts to several social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Click here for more information on using Publicize. This will get you the standard tweet format. That is okay but I wanted the tweet with more information and graphics in it. To get that format you have to use Twitter Cards and get it approved by Twitter. Here is the Twitter information on configuring Jetpack. There are several Twitter Card formats to choose from and I chose the Summary Card. The next trick is find the plugin that generates the correct meta data for Twitter, validate the card, and apply for approval. I tried several different plugins with varying degrees of success of getting the first image in the post into the tweet. Then I discovered that the best plugin to generate twitter meta data was one I already had installed, All In One SEO Pack. All I had to do was to activate the Social Meta feature and configure it. The changes I made were:
- I set Select OG:Image Source to “First Image in Content†to see the first image from the post.
- I deleted the default content in Default OG:Image to get rid of the default image.
When I was happy with the layout of the Summary Card preview, I applied for approval. I read somewhere that it takes up to 72 hours to get approved but my approvals arrived within a few minutes. Enjoy!