In this month’s release, we’re offering new ways to transform your content and extend your reach. Now it’s easier than ever to move content from your site to social media and vice versa.
Even better, all updates included in Jetpack 9.0 are available for free.
Read on
Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.
The power of social media is undisputed — it helps you deepen relationships with followers and reach new ones. It also adds another thing to your to-do list.
Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or something else, the time it takes to manually post to each one adds up. You’ve probably read blogs or heard experts suggest you automate social media posting to streamline business operations and help you remember to post consistently. Sounds great. But what’s the best way to get started with a WordPress site?
Continue reading → Free WordPress Plugin to Auto-Post & Share to Social Media
Jetpack 6.3.3 is now available for download. This point fix addresses an important change to our Publicize feature, which will limit your ability to share content to a Facebook Profile.
We’ve broken this post down into a few sections to help you understand the change, how it may impact your site, and how you can share your feedback with Facebook, so please read carefully.
Starting August 1, 2018, a change to Facebook’s API means that third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This includes Publicize, our feature that connects your site to major social media platforms like Facebook.
As a result, this release includes both the change to the Publicize feature, and a notice that is designed to help you with next steps:
We understand that you probably have some questions about this update, so here’s a little more information that will help you after you navigate this change easily.
It depends. If you’ve connected a Facebook Profile to your site, then yes: Publicize will no longer be able to share your posts to Facebook.
On the other hand, nothing will change if you keep a Facebook Page connected to your site — all your content should still appear directly on Facebook via Publicize.
If you’re not sure what the difference is between a Page and a Profile, here’s Facebook’s explanation.
If you still want your Facebook followers to see your new posts from your Jetpack-connected site, you have two options:
Facebook says that they’re updating their API to improve their platform and prevent the misuse of personal profiles. But we know that this might cause a disruption in the way you schedule and promote content, especially if you schedule promotions of your content on Facebook far in advance.
If you’d like to share your concerns on this change with Facebook, you can head to their Help Community and let them know your thoughts.
If you’re having trouble managing your connections to a Facebook Profile or Page after updating to 6.3.3, our experts are always available to answer questions and troubleshoot Publicize connections with you via our support channels. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if we can lend a hand.
If you’re looking for more details on this update, as always, the full changelog has what you need.
Thanks for your understanding, and please let us know if there are any further questions we can answer for you about this release, Publicize, or changes to the Facebook API.
Once you’ve created your latest piece of content, you naturally want to let the world know about it. But up until now, sharing your content on social media was a manual process, and one that ate up a lot of time you could have spent doing other things.
We wanted to make it easier for Jetpack users to share the great content they’ve been creating. That’s why we’re excited to add social media scheduling to Publicize, exclusively for our Premium and Professional plan customers.
With this new feature, you can choose specific times to share your content on your favorite social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can schedule one or many shares in advance, and Jetpack will take care of the rest, publishing your custom messages at the times you specify.
Up until now, Jetpack’s Publicize feature would allow you to share content manually. But now you can:
If you’re already a Jetpack Premium or Professional plan customer, you can try this new feature now. Look for the Share button under any single Post:
When you click Share, you can either share a post immediately or use the calendar tool to choose a time in the future that your content will be posted, tweeted, or shared on the network of your choice.
The social media accounts that you have connected to Jetpack will be displayed on the right side. You can choose which accounts to share to by clicking the toggles on and off (or, if you need to add a new account, clicking the icon in the top right).
To make sure you get the best results, click the Preview button to view what your content will look like when it’s shared. If you don’t like what you see, just keep on customizing until you’re happy with the results.
We hope you enjoy this new addition to Publicize — give it a try and let us know what feedback you have in the comments!
Publicize Scheduling is available to Jetpack Premium and Professional plan customers. Upgrade now to give it a try.
Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.
Sharing your posts on social media is a great way to ensure your site or blog gets traffic. Our Publicize feature makes it easy to automatically share your new posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks.
But what about your previously published posts? For posts that are always relevant or valuable to new readers, you may want to share them again — weeks, months, or even years later.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce Re-Publicize, a new feature for our Jetpack Premium and Professional users. Re-Publicize allows you to share previously published posts on social networks — with custom messaging for each service, as well.
This is part of the suite of services Jetpack sites can use on WordPress.com, including the ability to manage your site and plugins, write content, and now re-share your posts. Just go to the Blog Posts section of your site on WordPress.com, select Share, and you’ll see the new sharing menu for reposting to your social accounts:
Then you’re all set!
As a Premium or Professional customer, using Re-Publicize, it is now easier to automatically share existing posts to social media, allowing you to make the most of your content.
We’re excited about this new feature, and we hope you enjoy using it.
Jetpack 4.2.2 addresses an update to Facebook sharing counts and a few bug fixes.
If you use the Jetpack Sharing Buttons, you may have noticed yesterday that any existing sharing counts for Facebook disappeared! This was due to Facebook turning off a feature in their API that we used to grab and display Facebook sharing counts. There’s a great post on WordPress.org that goes into more detail into the problem.
Since it was only a matter of updating the API that we use to pull the sharing count data from Facebook, we wanted to get this out to you as soon as possible!
If you want to see the full list of what was updated in this release, you can check out the changelog.
Big thanks to those who contributed to this release:
Andrew Duthie, Daniel Walmsley, Elio Rivero, George Stephanis, Jeremy Herve, Marin Atanasov, Rich Collier, and Sam Hotchkiss.
When you publish a new post on your site, Jetpack crawls it and looks for images that can be used when sharing that post on Facebook, on Twitter, or if that post appears in the Top Posts and Pages widget in your sidebar.
Jetpack starts by looking for a Featured Image. If you didn’t define any, we will look for slideshows and galleries, and then for any images that may be attached to the post. If we don’t find any image attached to that post, we’ll look for single images you may have inserted in the post. If you’ve inserted an image that is hosted on another site, we can use it too.
However, sometimes you may not have added any image to your post. In such cases, you can add this code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file, or in a functionality plugin. This way, your readers will see a default image when sharing that post on Facebook, for example:
function jeherve_custom_image( $media, $post_id, $args ) {
if ( $media ) {
return $media;
} else {
$permalink = get_permalink( $post_id );
$url = apply_filters( 'jetpack_photon_url', 'YOUR_LOGO_IMG_URL' );
return array( array(
'type' => 'image',
'from' => 'custom_fallback',
'src' => esc_url( $url ),
'href' => $permalink,
) );
}
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_images_get_images', 'jeherve_custom_image', 10, 3 );
It’s worth noting that the fallback image has to be larger than 200 x 200px, as per Facebook requirements. If your image is smaller, Facebook will ignore it.
In the latest update to Jetpack, we have some exciting new features to share with you including integration of Google services and products, adding VideoPress to our list of modules, and the ability to embed your Facebook updates into your blog posts. Let’s take a closer look at each of these new features!
Continue reading → Jetpack 2.5: Google Integration, VideoPress, and Facebook Embeds
When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Social auto-shares a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags to build a complete post preview (with an image, title, description, …).
Jetpack automatically creates these meta tags for you, so you don’t have to worry about it!
Jetpack will also add an Image meta tag to your home page if you use a Site Logo, or a Site Icon. If you don’t use any of these 2 options, you might want to add your own custom image meta tag there. To do so, add one of the following code snippets to your theme’s functions.php file, or to a functionality plugin:
function fb_home_image( $tags ) {
if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) {
// Remove the default blank image added by Jetpack
unset( $tags['og:image'] );
$fb_home_img = 'YOUR_IMAGE_URL';
$tags['og:image'] = esc_url( $fb_home_img );
}
return $tags;
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_open_graph_tags', 'fb_home_image' );
Alternatively, you can change the default image used any time Jetpack can not determine an image to use:
function custom_jetpack_default_image() {
return 'YOUR_IMAGE_URL';
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_open_graph_image_default', 'custom_jetpack_default_image' );
It’s worth noting that the fallback image has to be larger than 200 x 200px, as per Facebook requirements. If your image is smaller, Facebook will ignore it.
How to increase your blog’s traffic with Jetpack
Jetpack comes with a set of features specifically designed to help you increase your site’s traffic and grow your audience. That is after all the reason we build websites and blogs and write content – for people to see them, read them and enjoy them 🙂
Jetpack helps you tackle this along two fronts: attracting new visitors to our sites and encouraging the existing ones to keep coming back.
Getting more traffic
Its worth mentioning what countless people have said before: writing well-written, useful and targeted content is eighty percent of the job. Neither Jetpack nor any other plugin, is a silver bullet that can ever be a substitute for that. However, if you’ve got that nailed, these features will help you with the other twenty percent:
The Sharing feature, when enabled, places share buttons at the bottom of your blog posts. This allows (and encourages!) your readers to share your content with their own networks giving you broader reach. Currently we support Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Print, and Email. Additionally you can define your own custom services.
Verifying your website with external services like Google, Bing and Pinterest. This means you will be rated as “safe” by these services (e.g. by getting a “Verified” badge) and gives you to access advanced features (e.g. Webmaster tools).
At WordPress.com we have a service called “Firehose” which is a stream of the public data (public posts, comments, etc.) that flow through WordPress.com as well as Jetpack blogs that enable Enhanced Distribution. The firehose in turn is used by companies and people to display your content at which point they are required to link back to your blog. This means that you get both traffic back to your site as well as building up quality back-links.
Keep them coming back
The other side of the coin is staying in touch with the visitors who’ve seen and read your content so that they don’t forget about you and come back to see what else you have to say. You may not necessarily want to use all of these of course as it depends a lot on the kind of site or blog you’re running. But because Jetpack makes it easy to turn these on and off some of our users opt to try things one at a time to test out their effect.
RSS is used by millions of people to keep track of blogs they like. When you enable Extra Sidebar Widgets in Jetpack you can show widget that allows you to add links to your blog’s RSS feeds in your sidebar. This makes it easy for your readers to stay updated when you post new content or receive new comments.
Easily allow any visitor to subscribe to all of your posts via email through a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Every time you publish a new post, WordPress.com will send a notification to all your subscribers. Depending on their preferences this notification will either show up on their WordPress bar (top right) or they will receive an email directly in their inbox.
Example of a comment Push Notification from the WordPress for iOS app
Finally, this last one is for you, the site owner. With Notifications enabled you will be instantly notified when somebody comments on any of your posts or previous comments. This means that you can instantly comment back making your interaction with your readers feel more personal and in real-time.
And of course, Jetpack also gives you great stats so that you can see the effect of your work! If you’ve not used Jetpack before, read our step-by-step installation guide here to try it out for yourself.
If you are a Jetpack user already please tell us what you think in the comments and, if you’d like to get involved by writing a guest post about Jetpack get in touch!