First to answer the question “why”, as it may not be obvious to everyone. If you compose things you want to share from your website to your social media accounts you can do so simultaneously as you publish to your blog. This saves the extra steps that in the past had to be completed from within your social media account itself, often endlessly copying, pasting and reformatting. Jetpack and WordPress make this an easy one step process – when it works. … for me, I went to publish a new blog post and discovered LinkedIn was not connected to my WordPress website. I had an “… or not” moment. See the comment at the bottom for the solution should you loose connection between your JetPack plugin, WordPress.com and your social media sites. While I was reconnecting my site to LinkedIn I thought I’d share the process of publishing to social media using JetPack.
JetPack is an awesome plugin tool that lets you do many things for free. One of them is the ability to post your WordPress blog to social media – of which LinkedIn is considered. Upfront I apologize for a loosely put together and long article. I hope I’ve captured sufficient screenshots to safely get you started in the process of sharing your blog content. If I’ve missed something please let me know so I can update this. I’ve posted step-wise images in hopes it fills in where I’ve failed to communicate with clarity. While the steps are straight forward there is an omission from the Jetpack and WordPress instructions which add functionality to sharing your work.
The “… or not” moment is in part my motivation for sharing the solution. Getting our website connected with Facebook and Twitter are really straight forward, but LinkedIn after a while can be sporadically problematic when it come to maintaining the connection. Our process will be:
- In our WordPress website admin panel install, activate and configure the Jetpack plugin.
- In our WordPress website admin panel add the social media accounts to link under the sub menu “Sharing‘ found in “Settings“.
- Login to our WordPress account (it may be necessary to create this) and authorize access to our social media accounts of interest.
- Return to our WordPress website blog editor, verify* the social media sites are connected in Jetpack and publish the final draft.
- *Go to our WordPress account in the event we are not connected in Jetpack and reconnect accordingly.
To get started install JetPack’s WordPress plugin you have three routes: 1) purchase a Jetpack plan and Jetpack will take care of the installation for you; 2) simply do it yourself and have your choice of either a free or paid plan, or 3) pay someone to set this up for you. To try out the free plan:
Login to your WordPress website Admin panel (this is typically a URL that looks like “https://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin”) and click on Plugins.
Click on one of the two “Add New” links:
You will see a “Keyword” search field, simply type in “Jetpack“, then press “enter” and WordPress magic happens. In the results you’ll find the Jetpack plugin. The one you are looking for is the “Jetpack – WP Security, Backp, Speed, & Growth“. You merely click on Install Now and then Activate (mine says “Active” because it is already installed). From here you should be prompted to go through a “Set up Jetpack” process where you can activate any of its other features. You should check out the “Getting Started with JetPack” setup guide for these features. The main thing here is that you establish and approve the connection to WordPress.com. This step is crucial as inevitably LinkedIn will disconnect and appear to stop functioning.
Following the initial setup you’ll find the Jetpack plugin in your WordPress admin panel. While we are going through all the trouble, let’s make it easy for our readers to share our articles on their social media accounts. This is a step I’ve found missing in the process described by Jetpack and WordPress that are on your website side of things where you select which social media sources you want to allow your readers to share your blog posts with. Before proceeding with Jetpack, in the admin menu towards the bottom you will find WordPress “Settings“, click and select “Sharing” in the resultant menu.
From here it is easy to add the social platforms you want to connect to by merely dragging the “Available Services” sharing buttons down to the “Enabled Services” section by holding down the left click on your mouse. This will map out the social services for WordPress.com. Be sure to click “Save” at the bottom of the page! Following this you can pick up the steps described from Jetpack for connecting to your social networks.
Now click “Jetpack” to expand the menu and then on “Settings“. From there look in the body of the window that opens for the word “Sharing” – click “Sharing“. Almost done!
You will now need to connect to your WordPress.com account. This will permit you to establish your social media connections, it will require you to log into each one individually and authorize the connection. The Jetpack instructions are pretty good from this point, simply click “Connect” and it’ll prompt you for your login information and authorize the connection. You can access this by clicking on “Connect your social media accounts“. From here we’ll follow Jetpacks’ instructions.
Once logged into your WordPress.com account enable Publicize per Jetpack instructions:
Log in to https://wordpress.com, and from the My Sites menu item at the top of the page, select the Jetpack-connected site you want to connect your social media accounts. Note: you may need to click on ‘Switch Sites’ to find the site you want to manage Publicize on.
Navigate to Tools → Marketing → Connections.
Click Connect next to the Social Network you want to connect to.
Log in to that Social Network site and authorize the connection.
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When you finish composing your blog post and you’ve reviewed it and are absolutely ready to publish it – you can select under the Jetpack logo which social media locations you want to publish to. In the picture below you can see I’ve selected Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When you click “Publish” it will not only be published on your website – it will also be pushed to each of the specified social media accounts too. Quick side note, “if” you mistakenly publish something with errors in it you only have to correct them on your website and then re-publish. Corrections are updated as you make them on your website, the social media sources “pull” the article information from your site. If you do “re-publish” you’ll end up with two copies of the same thing on your social media site and will probably want to remove one.
Now periodically LinkedIn will disconnect. In the past this created some errors and bloggers were unable to easily re-establish the connection. If this happens to you merely log back into WordPress.com and click “Connect” again for the social media outlet that isn’t working. You’ll be prompted to “login” and then to “Allow” – this should have you back up and working again.
As always, keep your website theme and plugins updated. Use best practices such as uninstalling any plugins you are not using and be aware of security related announcements for your web-host, WordPress and plugins. There are both a JetPack guide and a WordPress guide to Publicize (linked), I’ve kept mine brief with lots of pictures. For more information, reference the aforementioned. Best of luck!