Jetpack can help automate your site’s social media.
It’s a pretty small feature 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.
CSS-Tricks has social media accounts, for example, the Twitter handle @css. We largely use that account to notify folks when new content has been published to the site, and it’s been that way long enough that anyone following us there 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 nobody’s direct responsibility (other than mine) to manage social media. So, automation is very nice!
When we hit that lovely blue Publish button in WordPress, the post 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 “social 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 card as well, so you can see how it will look across Google (e.g. on a search results landing page) and the other accounts you’re connected to.
An awfully handy feature, I think! And just one of many things Jetpack does for us.
