Trick or treat!

festive, muse, newsletter, top tip

Halloween is big business. It used to just belong on ‘ET’ and American TV imports, but now it’s a reason for kids to dress up and take to the streets with a bucket, for collecting sweets and goodies!

The trick? We are suckered into the beginning of the buying season leading up to Christmas…

But, did you know?

  • Halloween – is not an American invention
  • Hallowe’en (a contraction of “All Hallows’ Evening) is in fact an ancient religious festival ‘All Hallowtide’ – a three-day festival praying for the recently departed to find their way to heaven. ‘All Hallows Eve’ – sometimes called Night of Light, followed by ‘All Saints, or Hallows Day’, then ‘All Soul’s’ day (2 November)
  • And …turnips were carved by the Irish and Scots until the American settlers discovered pumpkins.

Here’s a treat!

If you have WordPress (.com) site – here is a way to make a summary card for people tweeting pages from your site. This gives you a much longer and detailed post on Twitter

  1. You MUST have the Yoast SEO plugin installed (if you have a WordPress site, get it, you should be using it anyway!)
  2. On your WordPress site profile page, make sure that you have put in your Twitter username [SAVE]
  3. In your Yoast SEO social settings, put in your Twitter name. Choose the type of card you want to use (ie Summary card with large image) [SAVE]
  4. Go into your post editor, include a Featured image (if you chose ‘Summary card with large image’, you need to do this) write an SEO title and Meta description
  5. You now need to validate your card by inserting the link OF YOUR POST to your page via your Twitter account https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator – this will validate this and any further Tweeted pages from your site!

If you prefer to watch YouTube instructions – this is a great one for the Twitter summary card

Notes on image size
The image size for a Twitter ‘large image summary card’ should be no smaller than 280 x 150 px. I choose my favourite default size of 1024 x 512 px, that will gives a good image header size on your site, and will look good on Twitter too.

If you don’t know how to crop an image, get Canva, it has image sizes for Social Media preset, and is a great way to make quick graphics.

Activities