Twitter Cards Promises Developers More App Downloads

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Social integration should be a part of any app you develop. Sharing scores on Facebook and Twitter, along with any app related information can help drive downloads of your app, which in-turn make you more revenue.

Twitter has announced a couple new additions to their Twitter cards program. One is app deep-linking. Basically this works by including some schema information with your Twitter posts so that when someone sees a post made from an app, the app info goes with it - sort of like a "back link", if the person that sees the post wants to launch the app directly from Twitter, now they can.

In addition, Twitter will now show information about the app posting the information if you include some ID information so they can collect the data to show.

"Show information about your app, including app name, icon, description and other details like rating or price. Just give us your ID and we will display information about your app from the App Store or Google Play."

Facebook has had the ability to do this by means of the Graph API or OAuth for a while, but it takes more interconnection by the developer - actually sending the links to the app yourself, etc. So Twitter's new method is a welcome addition to the social aspect of any app, their hopes are that more developers use Twitter as a medium to share app info.