You may have noticed a few changes lately if you’re on Twitter. Linking to items hosted in VITA now expands to a beautiful full-sized image preview, or a small image preview with some descriptive text:
Any item with an image thumbnail under 300 pixels in width will show up as a small Twitter Card, called a Summary card.
Any item with a larger image will show up as a Large Image card:
If you’re not sure which Card will appear when you tweet out a VITA link, test it out first in the Card Validator.
In cultural heritage, we understand that you want to know when someone is using your digital resources, for your own statistics and impact assessment – and you want new users to be able to find the rest of your collections if they’re interested in what’s being shared. With the implementation of Twitter Cards in VITA, you’ll be able to do so.
When someone tweets a link to any page in your VITA site, it’ll automatically expand to a link preview that will look attractive – and will lead people back to your site when they click on it. This encourages browsing and discovery, and helps you prove the value of your shared digital collections – by knowing who’s interested in what items, and how far those items get shared on Twitter.
Let your social-media staff know that they no longer have to download and upload images from VITA to Twitter in order to have beautiful, eye-catching tweets. Just sharing the link will do it for you! It’s as easy as using the Share function on each VITA page:
There’s a guide to Twitter Cards in VITA in our Help Site, with lots more information – social media staff may want to familiarize themselves with it.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about social media best practices with VITA.
You’ll also notice in the VITA Agency Management interface, there’s now a space to enter in your organizational Twitter account name:
This will add a metadata line to each and every uploaded item in VITA, indicating that your account is responsible for the content.
If you’re curious, it looks like this:
We’re relying on the OpenGraph API functionality, which Twitter has recently begun to recognize – meaning we hardly had to add any Twitter-specific metadata.
We’ll be continuing to work on adding more functions in the future – but this is a feature addition we’re very proud of.
