Why It Exists
Twitter built its own preview tags in 2012, two years after Facebook built Open Graph. The two overlap almost completely. X reads Open Graph tags when its own are missing, but the card tag itself decides the shape of the preview, and the big-picture shape is only available by asking for it.
What It Looks Like
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Gable Exterior Cleaning | Pressure Washing in the New River Valley"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="Soft washing and pressure washing for homes across the New River Valley."> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://gableexterior.example/includes/og-image.jpg">
The card type is the line that matters. "summary" gives a small square thumbnail beside the text. "summary_large_image" gives the full-width picture above it, which is the one that gets noticed in a feed. BizPinPro sets the large image on every page and points it at the same share image Open Graph uses, so the business is shown the same way on every platform.
Does A Local Business Need It
Most local customers are on Facebook, not X. The tags cost four lines and are set once in the shared head of the site, so there is no reason to leave them out, and a handful of apps beyond X read them too. It is the kind of thing that is either done on every page from the start or never done at all.
How To Check It
Paste the site address into a new post on X without publishing it and look at the preview. A small square thumbnail, or no picture, means the card tag is missing or set to summary.
See it on a working build: the pressure washing page shows the card tags beside the Open Graph ones they ride with.
The Foundation Connection
Twitter cards sit with Open Graph in the Verified Identity layer of the Digital Foundation: the places where a business decides how it is presented instead of leaving it to a platform's guess.
