Publicize

Publicize makes it easy to share your site’s posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish a new post.

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

1. Go to Settings → Sharing in your  dashboard;
2. Click on “Connect” next to the Social Network you want to connect to;
3. 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, just click the Publicize Edit link. You can then uncheck whichever services you want. You can also customize the message that gets sent by typing it in to the Custom Message box.

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:

1. Featured image
2. An image attached to the post and inserted
3. 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.

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:

1. 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” by your Custom Post Type name.

2. You can add Publicize support when registering the post type, like so:

   // 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:

• How to remove Publicize options from the New Post screen
• Prevent the connections from being auto-selected

Troubleshooting Publicize

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