Publicize

Publicize makes it easy to share your site’s posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish a new post. Our Premium and Professional plan users can also share content that has already been published, and schedule their posts to be shared at a specific time.

You can connect your site to one of your social network profiles by following these steps:

Go to Settings → Sharing in your dashboard;
Click Connect next to the Social Network you want to connect to;
Log in to that Social Network site and authorize the connection.

Once you’ve approved a connection to any of the services available, you’ll see a Publicize section in the Publish box on your post writing screen each time you write a new post.

Just publish the post as usual, and you’ll see it show up on the services you enabled.

If you want to opt out from any of the Publicize services for a specific post, click the Publicize Edit link. You can then uncheck the services you do not want to share that post to.

You can also customize the message that gets sent by typing it into the Custom Message box. Due to the character limits imposed by Twitter and other social media networks, you will only have a limited amount of characters available for your message.

Re-sharing your content

This feature is for Premium and Professional plan users.

With Publicize, you can re-share your previously published and shared content on social media sites.

To re-share your content, go to My Sites → Blog Posts and look for the post you want to share. Under every post in your post list is a Share button. When you click it, a sharing menu will appear.

You can customize the message, or use the default sharing message (the title of the post). When you are happy with your message, click Preview to see a preview of how it will appear once shared, or Share post to publish it.

By selecting connected services for each Publicize action, you can craft your message according to your audiences, or use different messages for each of your accounts. You can toggle on or off locations to share each message to on the right side by clicking the sliders.

Please note that this feature is not currently supported for Custom Post Types.

Scheduling your shares

This feature is for Premium and Professional plan customers.

With Publicize, you are able to schedule shares or re-shares of your content for specific dates and times in the future.

To schedule shares of your content, go to My Sites → Blog Posts and look for the post you want to share. Under every post in your post list is a Share button. When you click it, a sharing menu will appear.

At the bottom left you will see a Share post button. Click the calendar icon beside this button to choose a date and time that you would like your content to be shared.

When you are happy with your message, click Preview to see a preview of how it will appear once shared, or Schedule to schedule the share for the date and time you have selected.

By selecting different connected services for scheduled shares, you can craft your messages for different networks, audiences, or time zones.

Please note that this feature is not currently supported for Custom Post Types.

Need more detail?

Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Tumblr
LinkedIn
Path
Images in Publicize
Additional Information
How to use Publicize with your Custom Post Types
How to customize Publicize
Troubleshooting Publicize

Images in Publicize

Facebook and Twitter Publicize select images that are at least 200 x 200 pixels in the following order:

Featured image
An image attached to the post and inserted
Any other image in the post (not attached but perhaps linked)

Tumblr Publicize will display an image if your post is an image post format or if there is an image embedded within the first 256 characters of the post.

Note: If you wish to use Twitter Cards you will need to submit your website to Twitter for them to be displayed. You can do so here. For more information on this subject, check the official Twitter documentation.

Additional Information

Saving a post as a Draft will not publicize it.
Static pages will not be publicized.
Scheduled posts do get publicized – at the time they’re scheduled to publish.
Publicize only works for brand new posts that have never been published before. You cannot re-publicize something once it has already been published.
If you use a plugin to clone or duplicate existing posts, it will also duplicate its status. If the original post is already published, Publicize won’t be triggered for the cloned post.
Publicize works for Administrator, Editor, or Author user roles. If you’re a Contributor for a blog, you cannot use Publicize.
When you add new connections, you have the option to decide whether it will be available to just your account or all of the other users on the blog as well. To make the connection available to everyone, just check the prompt for that at the time you add the connection.
When making a connection available to all users of a blog, the only thing any other user on your site can do is post to the social network. They do not have access to do anything else such as getting access to the social network account directly.

How to use Publicize with your Custom Post Types

By default, Publicize is only triggered when you publish a new post. You can, however, extend this to other Custom Post Types. You have 2 options to add Publicize Support to a Custom Post Type:

You can add Publicize support to an existing post type thanks to the add_post_type_support() function. To do so, add the following code to a functionality plugin:
```
add_action('init', 'my_custom_init');
function my_custom_init() {
    add_post_type_support( 'product', 'publicize' );
}
```
You’ll need to replace “product” with your Custom Post Type name.

You can add Publicize support when registering the post type:

// Register Custom Post Type
function custom_post_type() {

    $labels = array(
        'name'                => _x( 'Products', 'Post Type General Name', 'text_domain' ),
    );
    $args = array(
        'label'               => __( 'product', 'text_domain' ),
        'supports'            => array( 'title', 'editor', 'publicize', 'wpcom-markdown' ),
    );
    register_post_type( 'product', $args );

}
// Hook into the 'init' action
add_action( 'init', 'custom_post_type', 0 );

How to customize Publicize

Publicize also includes filters to allow you to customize the default behavior with additional plugins, or via a simple addition to your theme’s functions.php. Here are a few examples:

Troubleshooting Publicize

If you are having trouble with Publicize, take a look at our Troubleshooting page, or feel free to contact us.

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