Table of Contents
- What are Social Media Cards?
- Difference Between a Normal Post and a Clickable Social Media Card
- Do Social Media Cards Really Matter?
- Creating Clickable Social Media Cards
- Benefits of Social Media Cards
- Tips to Design Good Social Media Card
- Do’s and Don’t of Social Media Cards
Introduction
58.4% of the global population uses some form of social media.
This is over half the world’s population, and your target audience is in it. If you aren’t yet streamlining your social marketing strategies to better reach and woo this audience, it is time to learn a few new tricks.
“Social media cards” – your virtual business cards for social media – are now leading the marketing and advertisement trends. Buffer experimented with the latest feature on Twitter – the capability to create visual tweets – and the results were more than baffling. The businesses that used this feature got:
- 150% more retweets
- 89% boost in favorites
- 18% more clicks than before
The message is clear: a visual, media-rich representation of your brand on a social network works brilliantly to improve audience engagement with your posts. When used right, your business could exponentially increase conversion rates.
However, using visual content for the sake of it isn’t enough; the whole experience of viewing your clickable social card needs to be appealing to your audience.
Let’s learn more about social media cards, why they matter, and how you can leverage them best.
What are Social Media Cards?
Social cards are clickable image posts that can be used on social media. They are highly visual and are meant to draw the viewer’s attention to them, engage them in your offerings, and get them to tap for more information.
Earlier, social media networks weren’t very flexibly designed for use by businesses; the functionalities a social ad could thus offer were limiting. With the option to add images to your social media ad through clickable social cards, your business now has the opportunity to attract and engage a larger portion of the viewers scrolling through your feed.
According to Brain Rules, people can retain 65% of the information they gather from posts with an associated image even after three days. This goes to say that attaching an image with your business information on social media has the potential to garner more attention for a sustained period.
What goes into making a clickable social card?
A social media card typically consists of four elements:
- An image that defines your brand to the audience in a captivating way
- The title of your business, much like a physical visiting card
- The description of your business in a short, hooking sentence
- An embedded URL that redirects the viewer to either your landing page or any other location your business intends for that clickable social card
Difference Between a Normal Post and a Clickable Social Media Card
If you observe, clickable social media cards look more or less like a social media post. What, then, is the differentiator between them?
While a typical social media post contains an image, a caption, tags for other concerned people, and hashtags for outreach, a clickable social media card is slightly different in the background. A social card contains everything a post does, and a clickable URL redirects the viewer to a specified destination.
If you tap on a normal social media post, you would still remain on the social network’s feed. However, if you tap on a social media card, you will be redirected to the page the company wants you to see.
You could say that social media cards are visual links to a company’s landing page.
Do Social Media Cards Really Matter?
Images can greatly impact the viewer – especially when the visual content is relatable and bold. Brands leveraging this capability of visual content to turn their social media into a lead magnet reap the true benefits of clickable social cards.
Hubspot, in a study they recently conducted on Twitter clickable social cards, discovered a few very interesting statistics that would make you reconsider not incorporating this strategy in your marketing campaigns:
- The tweets with images saw a stellar increase of 55% in the leads they generated
- These tweets were also responsible for a 31% increase in visits
- There was an increase of 33% in visitor-to-lead conversions through tweets with images
- 36% more clicks were observed on tweets with images
If your competitors utilize the power of clickable social cards and you don’t, they would be gaining more visitors, leads, and conversions than you. For the sake of business furtherance, clickable social cards are slowly but steadily becoming the norm in social media advertising.
A well-designed social media card conveys more to a visitor than a post can: the visual information delivered will likely stay longer in your visitor’s mind than text-based information. Clickable social cards can give you actual, measurable long-term benefits when designed with the objective in mind and with a view to clearly express it to your consumers.
Tips to Design a Good Social Media Card
Creating an engaging, clickable social media card is straightforward if you have your objectives lined up. Follow the five tips below to create clickable social cards that garner audience attention.
Leverage the Power of Branding
Your consumers shouldn’t have to fish for your brand’s name from the text you include in the social card. While designing one, ensure that you place your logo prominently enough to be noticed as the first thing when your card appears on the feed. Doing this quickly delivers the necessary information to your potential customers while saving you more space on the card to relay other information.
By working on the placement of your brand, you can create a great image that works as it should.
Use Visuals
Visual posts are instinctively more appealing to consumers than ads without any visual aid. Include an aesthetic image that resonates with your brand and objective to get user attention, and then proceed to explain what your ad is about.
A balanced combination of image and text in your social card will work in tandem to improve impressions, click-through rates, and conversions from the clickable social card.
Write Convincing Copy
If you include an image that speaks volumes, an impactful ad copy may not be required at all. However, it is also possible to harmonize these two elements as complementary to make a clickable social card that is bold and speaks directly to the viewer instead of stating a general purpose.
Writing a convincing copy involves a deep knowledge of the ongoing trends (which will be instantly noticeable to people) and connecting the benefits of your products and services to such trends.
Design Intelligently
The design part is the hardest – you need to either source a template that resonates with your business or create your own with brand colors and tone. Apps like Canva get the job done fairly well for small and medium businesses; however, larger organizations like to hire designers to create their own designs.
The colors, accents, fonts, spacing, and even the tone of the social cards need to be in total sync with the brand identity for it to be any good.
Choose the Right Tools
A good design needs good ideas and the right tools to execute it. If you have in-house graphic designers, ensure they have access to the right software to create the kind of clickable social card you want. If not, you can create one using apps like Canva that provide ready and customizable templates.
It is best to have a professional do this because of the world of insights they can bring to the project – the result would be much better than a self-made social media card.
Creating Clickable Social Media Cards
Are you ready to create a clickable social card for your business? Follow the simple steps listed below to get it done quickly.
Select Your Tool
Graphic design tools help create stunning, clickable social cards representing your brand. Ensure that the team in your organization is equipped with a reliable, good design tool that can perform the kind of graphics customizations you need for your social card.
Select a Template
If you would rather work with a ready, customizable design than create your own, you can look up thousands of templates for clickable social cards online. Most are usually free to use and are customizable according to brand voice. If you wish to get more functionality, you can purchase a template and get access to its code for modification.
Write the Copy
Now is the time to insert your ad copy into the template. It is best to first study the template to see how many words it allows to be displayed effectively. You may want to create a copy according to this limit to make it more aesthetically pleasing.
Create the Image
Your graphic designer must coordinate with the social media card team to create an image that fits the card without needing to crop or resize it. It is best to retain its original resolution for optimal output.
Benefits of Social Media Cards
In addition to attracting more consumers to your brand, many benefits ensue from using clickable social cards:
- Clickable social cards can redirect the viewer to your page without any in-betweens. This alone helps to boost traffic to your landing pages.
- Images are proven to be effective in garnering consumer attention better than text. Social media cards can display your brand to the audience elegantly, driving engagement.
- Since you get the opportunity to include an image and a link with your post, you can get creative and draft a card that makes a splash on social media.
- Social cards have the power to deliver an impactful first impression of your brand to the consumers.
- Using Socxly’s URL shortening tool can help bring delayed leads back to your website by making URLs simple to remember.
Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Cards
Not sure how to start building your social media card? Let’s look at some do’s and don’ts you can keep in mind.
- DO select an image that represents not just your company but the message you want to deliver through the social ad as well.
- DO include your contact details in the card should customers want to reach you.
- Don’t use redundant content that is bland or reused.
- Don’t try to deliver too much information on the social card itself.
- DO keep it crisp and targeted.
- DO have a landing page or a proper redirect destination set up to justify your offers and claims on the card.
In Closing
Marketing and advertising are highly dynamic industries; what is trending today may sputter into oblivion tomorrow. However, social media has been going strong for quite some time now, and clickable social cards are proving to be a great way to make your business known in these circles. Clickable social cards boost consumer engagement and help deliver the right brand image to your consumers. Leverage the power of social media using clickable social cards as your tool to drive more engagement and traffic to your website. Use the guide above to get your brand noticed on social networks.
