This guide provides instructions for how to connect your WordPress.com site to various social networking services. Once connected to a service, you can share your posts with that service automatically.

Table of Contents

Setting Up Publicize
Using Publicize
Sharing Your Content Again
Facebook Pages
Twitter
LinkedIn
Tumblr
Google+ Profiles and Pages
Images in Publicize
Additional Information
Reconnecting Services
Common Reasons Why a Post Failed to Publicize

Setting Up Publicize

To connect your site to your social networks, go to My Site → Tools → Marketing in your dashboard. You’ll see various services in the Connections section: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Eventbrite. To connect to a service, click the Connect button and follow the prompts.

Need more information or having trouble with connecting to a particular service? Read on.

Facebook does not allow any third-party tools, including Publicize, to automatically share posts to Facebook Profiles. You can continue to share posts automatically to Facebook Pages.

What’s the difference between a Facebook Profile and Facebook Page?

If you’d like to share your concerns with Facebook, head to their Help Community.

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Using Publicize

Once you’ve approved a connection to any of these services, the next time you publish a post, you’ll see the Publicize options on the confirmation screen under Share this post:

You can write a custom message to go along with the post that will appear on the social media. You can also toggle off different services to prevent sharing the post to a specific social media platform.

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Sharing Your Content Again

Re-publicizing posts is a feature for sites on our WordPress.com Premium plan and Business plan plans.

You’ll then see the Publicize options where you can add a custom message, toggle which social media platform you want to share to, and manage connections. Select Share Post to re-share the post.

By selecting among your connected Publicize accounts, you can craft your message to specific networks and audiences and use different wording for each one.

If you’re trying to share a post from another author on your site, make sure that the Publicize connections are global and valid for all users on the site. If they’re not, you will only be able to share again the posts of which you’re the author.

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Facebook Pages

Facebook does not allow any third-party tools, including Publicize, to automatically share posts to Facebook Profiles. You can continue to share posts automatically to Facebook Pages.

If you’d like to share your concerns with Facebook, head to their Help Community.

• Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections.
• Select the Connect button next to Facebook.
• In the window that pops up, log into Facebook.
• Follow the prompts:
  • Choose which Facebook Pages connected to your profile you want to share to.
  • Choose what WordPress.com is allowed to do on behalf of your pages.
  • Select Okay
• You’ll be taken back to WordPress.com and another pop-up will ask you to confirm connecting your account
• Click Connect and you’re done!

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Twitter

• Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections
• Click the Connect button next to Twitter
• A new window will open. Select Authorize app.
• Sign into your Twitter account and choose the account you want to connect to.
• After returning to WordPress.com, you’ll see another pop up window confirming the connection. Select Connect.

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LinkedIn

• Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections
• Click the Connect button next to LinkedIn
• In the new window that opens:
  • Sign into your LinkedIn account
  • Approve the connection to WordPress.com by selecting Allow
• After returning to WordPress.com, you’ll see another pop up window confirming the connection. Select Connect.

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Tumblr

• Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections
• Click the Connect button next to Tumblr.
• In the new window that opens:
  • Sign into your Tumblr account
  • Approve the connection to WordPress.com by selecting Allow
• After returning to WordPress.com, you’ll see another pop up window confirming the account you want to connect. Select Connect.

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Google+ Profiles and Pages

Google+ has been shut down by Google as of March 2019. It is not possible to share posts to Google+ through Publicize anymore.

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Images in Publicize

When using Publicize to share a post, most of the social media platforms try and pull an image into the preview.

Facebook Publicize typically selects images that are at least 480 x 480 pixels in the following order:

1. Featured image
2. The first image of a slideshow within the post
3. The first image of a gallery within the post
4. An image attached to the post
5. Any other image in the post (not attached but perhaps linked)

Twitter Publicize:

• Requires you to first validate your site to use Twitter Cards in order to share images through Publicize.
• Do this by submitting a post to their Card Validator. This will need to be done for each Card Type by submitting a post example for each. For example if your post has a gallery, Twitter will share it as a Gallery Card, this Card Type would need to be validated.

Tumblr Publicize will display an image:

• If your post is an image post format
• If there is an image embedded within the first 256 characters of the post.

These social services sometimes make changes on their end and may display a different image than expected. While we can try and influence which image they try and use, it is ultimately up to the platform to choose. To exert the most control over which image is shown, set a featured image for each post.

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Additional Information

Multiple connections to the same account:

• You can connect multiple social service accounts from the same WordPress.com account. This means you can connect five Twitter accounts, for example, and your posts will publish to all of them.
• If you are a blog administrator, you can also “share” any connection, so that all your authors can publicize to the same account without each author having to set up their own connection separately.
• Other WordPress.com Administrators, Editors, or Authors on the blog can also have their own Publicize connections in addition to yours.

Who can set up Publicize connections:

• Administrator, Editor, or Author user roles can setup Publicize connections.
• If you’re a Contributor for a blog, you cannot use Publicize.
• Only Administrators can share their connections with other users.

A note about Terms of Service: Sharing your post to another online service, via Publicize, may subject your shared content that other service’s terms of use. Many other online services have terms of use or content guidelines that differ from our WordPress.com Terms of Service. Often, these terms give the service rights in user published content that are greater than the rights we (Automattic) have in content published to WordPress.com.

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Reconnecting Services

Sometimes the connection between one of your social networking services and WordPress.com might get disconnected. Not to worry, the following steps should get you up and running again quickly:

Reconnecting Facebook

1. Log into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and click Disconnect next to the link to the Facebook profile or page you wish to disconnect.
2. Reload the page and confirm the link now says Connect, but don’t click that link yet.
3. Log into your Facebook account. Then go to your Facebook Account Settings →Business Integrations page by clicking this Business Integration Settings link.
4. Remove the WordPress.com app by checking the box next to it and click Remove. (If there is no WordPress.com row, don’t worry, just skip this step). If you see a popup asking for confirmation, click the “Remove” button.
5. Do not check the box to delete content created by WordPress.com. This will remove all previously publicized posts and there is no way to recover them.
6. Log back into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and follow these steps to reconnect.

Reconnecting Twitter

1. Log into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and click Disconnect next to the link to the Twitter account you wish to disconnect.
2. Reload the page and confirm the link now says Connect.
3. Clear your browser’s cookies (this clears some cookies that Twitter sets which are often part of the problem).
4. Log back into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and follow these steps to reconnect.

Reconnecting LinkedIn

1. Log into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Tools → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and click Disconnect next to the link to the LinkedIn account you wish to disconnect.
2. Reload the page and confirm the link now says Connect.
3. Clear your browser’s cookies (this clears some cookies that LinkedIn sets which are likely part of the problem).
4. Log back into your WordPress.com site. Go to My Site → Marketing → Connections in your dashboard and follow these steps to reconnect.

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Common Reasons Why a Post Failed to Publicize

• If you schedule a post, it will not be publicized until it is actually published.
• If you revert a post to a draft, then publish it again, it will not publicize it again. To share a post to your social media platforms again, see this section.
• Saving a post as a draft will not publicize it.
• Static pages will not be publicized.
• If you have trouble with your posts not being sent to a specific service, disconnecting/reconnecting will often help fix it. See the instructions above for how reconnect for each different Publicize service. After connecting/reconnecting the services, you need to publish a new post to test if Publicize is reconnected.