“Twitter Cards” Release Has Mobile App Developers Salivating

Twitter has been fighting stiff competition from the likes of Google and Facebook for quite sometime. Developers are being wooed by just about all the big players in the tech space.

On Tuesday night at their San Francisco headquarters, Twitter announced the release of a new set of tools that are sure to benefit the iPhone app developer community. According to a news article by Business Insider, Twitter unveiled an update to its “Twitter Cards” technology designed to push users to either download new apps or use the apps they’ve already installed more frequently.

New Twitter features include what’s referred to as deep-linking within mobile apps. This enables Twitter users to click links within tweets and then open up an app. Venture Beat sums it up as now content can be shared from within an app to Twitter by one user, then seen on Twitter and viewed within an app again by another user. If a user doesn’t have the app, they’ll be given an option to download it, right from within the tweet.

App discovery is an uphill battle. Just about any iPhone app developer in Los Angeles you speak with will agree that many times creating an app is easier than marketing one. There are over 800,000 iOS apps to choose from in the iTunes app store alone and another 700,000 or more Android apps submitted to Google Play store.

Apps don’t just download themselves its rare that they are just found. Users need to be shown apps that appeal to them at the times when they’re most likely to download them, while they’re using their smartphone. Mobile app developers and app marketers can now drive new app download directly via Twitter. All they have to do is add a few lines of code to content shared from their app to Twitters social network.Mind you that this new user acquisition channel will only end up helping apps that have Twitter’s social media tools integrated.