beamalsky/chivaxbot

consider using twitter cards instead of images

Closed this issue · 3 comments

fgregg commented

First off, congratulations on a perfect agitation. What a smart, resonant project!

I was thinking that it might be nice to have the tweets lead folks to https://covid19neighborhoods.southsideweekly.com/, by having the tweets include twitter cards instead of images.

Method:

One way you could do that:

  1. For the South Side Weekly site, have gatsby generate N parameterized versions of the page, i.e.
  2. For each parameterized version, have the twitter card's url take the parameters from the page, i.e. <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/beamalsky/chivaxbot/master/card/comparison/2021-01-25.png">
  3. Have this bot generate the images, which it will store in this repo and tweet out an appropriately parameterized url to https://covid19neighborhoods.southsideweekly.com?date=2021-01-26&card=comparison

Cons:

  1. Quote Tweeting the bot's tweets will not include the image if you use a twitter card. This is a pretty major disadvantage and probably makes it not worthwhile
  2. More complicated to orchestrate

Pros:

  1. Will much more efficiently drive interest to the South Side Weekly's other covid reporting
  2. Ability to correct or enhance already sent out tweets
fgregg commented

Quote Tweeting the bot's tweets will not include the image if you use a twitter card. This is a pretty major disadvantage and probably makes it not worthwhile

this tradeoff between shareability and driving traffic seems a bad one. I suppose that's why lots of social media managers don't use the QT, but instead make a tweet with an image and then have the url in the tweet body.

Screenshot_2021-01-26 The Verge on Twitter

beamalsky commented

Thanks for this @fgregg. I've been meaning to add dynamically updating cards to https://covid19neighborhoods.southsideweekly.com itself and I agree it's a neat tactic for visualizations that change!

For this bot, the tradeoff of images not showing up in retweets does not make this a positive change to me. I also like the archival aspect of the images as they are, and would not want to swap them out for something that we could modify later.

fgregg commented

makes sense! i wish cards had better trade-offs.