For some time now, Twitter has given users the option of creating Cards that are more than just simple Tweets and are more eye-catching too. Using Twitter's “Lead Generation” Cards, you can give your followers the option to sign up to receive your emails from within Twitter without having to fill in a great long form, they just click a button and Twitter passes their email address, Twitter username, and their name to you.

It's a fairly straightforward process to set this up: you create a Signup Form in Sentori, sign your Twitter account up for Twitter Ads and create a Lead Generation Card that points at the Sentori Signup Form.

Creating the Sentori Signup Form

Twitter will forward on values submitted through your Lead Generation Card by your followers to a Sentori Signup Form. The values Twitter passes are quite simple: email address, Twitter handle, and the name set on the Twitter account.

Sentori provides you with FirstName and LastName Fields, but the name value you get from Twitter could actually be someone's first and last name together, e.g. “John Smith”, or the name of a business so you might wish to point it at Sentori's KnownAs Field, or just not collect it at all.

If you do wish to store the username from Twitter, you should create a new Field, perhaps called “Twitter Username”, before moving on to creating your Signup Form.

Create a Signup Form as normal (adding the Field for Twitter username if required), go to “Step 4: Share” and choose “I'll host it, give me the HTML” then grab the following values from the popup:

+ The “action” value at the very top (e.g. “http://sntX.net/signup.aspx”).
+ The “account” value.
+ The “signupform” value.
+ The names of the other Fields as they appear, e.g. “ContactPropertyEmailAddress”, “ContactPropertyTwitterUsername”, “ContactPropertyKnownAs”.

Setting the values in Twitter

Go to your Lead Generation Card and copy/paste the values into the form under the “Data settings” heading:

+ Submit URL is the “action” value.
+ HTTP method must be set to “POST”.
+ For the “USER INFORMATION TO BE RECEIVED” fields, set them as follows:

Name		ContactPropertyKnownAs (if you want to store it)
Email		ContactPropertyEmailAddress
Screen name	ContactPropertyTwitterHandler

+ For the “CUSTOM HIDDEN DATA VALUES” fields, add the following:

account		[use the "account" value from Sentori]
signupform	[use the "signupform" value from Sentori]

Clicking the “Update card” button at the bottom of the page will have Twitter try out your form by submitting your Twitter user's values to it. If all works correctly, you should see a positive green message saying so, if you don't, get in touch with us so we can help you out.