Automate your site social media posting with Jetpack
Jetpack can help automate your site’s social media.
It’s a pretty small feature when compared to all the huge stuff Jetpack can do, like improve your site’s search, back it up, and protect it, but it’s a feature I love nonetheless.
At CSS-Tricks, we have social media accounts, for example, the Twitter handle @css. We largely treat that as a way to be notified of new content on the site, and it’s been that way for long enough that anyone following that account knows that. I could manually tweet each blog post that we publish, and there is nothing wrong with that, but we publish multiple articles a day and it’s really nobodies direct responsibility (other than mine) to manage social media. So, automation is very nice!
When we hit that lovely blue Publish button on new content, it automatically goes to Twitter and Facebook (and could go to Tumblr and LinkedIn if we had accounts on those). Even if we do nothing at all, a Tweet goes out with the title of the post and a link to it, and the meta tags on the site make for a decent “card”. But with Jetpack, we also have the opportunity to customize the message that goes out, which is a great touch.
Just recently, they also added the ability to be able to preview the social media card as well, so you can see how it will look across Google (e.g. what the post will look like on a search results landing page) and the other sites you’ve connected to.
An awfully handy feature, I think! And just one of many things Jetpack does for us.
