Publicize posts to Facebook as WordPress.com instead of blog!

Thanks for the feedback!

While all of this not rocket science, it’s not as simple as it sounds either ??

To automatically post on a Facebook Profile or a Facebook Page, you need to develop an app that will post on your behalf. When creating that app, Facebook gives you a limited set of options to build a “custom story” that will be displayed on your Facebook Profile.

These options allow you to build sentences that match different genders, different tenses, and obviously different actions. That’s what allows Foursquare to build sentences like “Jeremy Herve was at Place Name” for example, or “Jeremy Herve published an article on WordPress”.

Part of that custom story is App Attribution. You can choose between several suffixes for your updates: “at App Name”, “in App Name”, “on App Name”, “with App Name”, “using App Name”.

You can find out more about this:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/custom

App attribution always uses the app name, so you can customize things by changing the app name. That’s exactly what happens when you use a tool like SNAP, that requires you to create a Facebook app. Since you’ve created your own app, the app name is built to fit your needs.

Jetpack’s Publicize module, however, does not require you to create a Facebook app. We’ve chosen to make things as easy as possible for everyone by creating the app for you. We’ve built a single service, Publicize, going through a single app, that publishes to Facebook on behalf of all the site owners using WordPress.com or a Jetpack site.

We had initially named our app “WordPress.com”, but changed it to “WordPress” once the Publicize service became available to site owners like you, who host your site somewhere else and use Jetpack.

We can’t rename the app to match your site’s name though; if we were to do so, all stories published by our app would use your site’s name, for all Publicize users.

We’ve considered other names as well, “Jetpack” being one of them. Unfortunately that’s not possible with the way our system is built at the moment, since we use a single app for WordPress.com sites and Jetpack sites.

That’s obviously a limitation when using a service like Publicize: we make it easy to connect your site to Facebook, you don’t have to create a Facebook Developer account, create an app, configure the app, copy and paste app IDs and secrets between Facebook and your site. On the other hand, you also have less control over the look of the app, since it’s the same app that is used by lots of other site owners.

In the end, if you do need that kind of control, you’re better off using a service like SNAP, that was built to offer you full control over your app on Facebook.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Hey Jeremy,

Just did a quick search for **jetpack “published an article on WordPress”** since, like Richard Foley originally stated, I want to change the representation in the title.

First off, I’m a huge fan of Publicize and it is used on most of the nearly 300 sites we’ve built on WordPress over the last several years. It’s made life so much easier for clients (and me) and you’ve truly built a fabulous seamless integration with multiple social media sites.

All that said, as Richard pointed out, “I did NOT publish any article on WordPress.com.” and “Neither is there any need for this, other social media plugin sharers (like blog2social and SNAP), manage to post to Facebook with the blog user name (as would be expected), and JetPack posts to Twitter just fine.” and I concur with that assessment.

a) You could have this as the default string as App Attribution for the plugin: “Steve Borsch published an article using WordPress” and have the WP link go to www.ads-software.com instead of .com which would be more acceptable to those of us who self-host (Note: You could have a WordPress.com published article use the .com link and a self-hosted publish link to .org). Having it go to .com is just confusing.

Also, why are their two links to WordPress in the output?

b) Expecting non-developers connecting Jetpack to their self-hosted sites to use Publicize and instead use a tool like SNAP, is like recommending they use a bazooka to kill an ant.

———————–

I appreciate the limitations App Attribution entails but I’ll wager more clever minds than mine could come up with a method that would allow more control for us and inadvertent clicking on a link that would take a Facebook reader to the .com site where they would obviously wonder where the heck they landed!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 12 months ago by Steve Borsch.

Thanks for the feedback!

For reference, this was also brought up in a blog post here a little while ago.

You could have this as the default string as App Attribution for the plugin: “Steve Borsch published an article using WordPress” and have the WP link go to www.ads-software.com instead of .com

We’ve talked about changing that link to point to jetpack.com in the past, but I don’t think we’ve ever considered pointing to www.ads-software.com. Since the Publicize service isn’t provided by www.ads-software.com, I think it would be confusing for your readers aiming to implement auto-posting on their own sites. They wouldn’t really know where to go after landing on www.ads-software.com.

Pointing to Jetpack.com, however, is definitely an option. However, as I pointed out in my post above, it’s currently not possible since we use a single app to manage auto-posting for both WordPress.com and Jetpack sites.

why are their two links to WordPress in the output?

I’m afraid that’s not something we can control; Facebook manages the way the posts are displayed. I believe the first mention of “WordPress” is pulled from the app’s “Object” property; that’s described as “The thing the actor interacts with” in app settings. The second mention of “WordPress” is the app name.

b) Expecting non-developers connecting Jetpack to their self-hosted sites to use Publicize and instead use a tool like SNAP, is like recommending they use a bazooka to kill an ant.

I couldn’t agree more. We built Publicize for that specific purpose. We wanted to provide a user-friendly way to connect a WordPress site to a Facebook account, without having to go through all the hoops of creating a Facebook Developer account, creating an app, configuring it, and maintaining it.

That said, SNAP is currently one of the best options if you want full control over the look of your posts on Facebook. While Jetpack’s Publicize makes it simple to connect your site to your Facebook account, it is not as flexible as a solution like SNAP.

There are a few things we’d like to do make the Publicize feature more flexible; things like templates or better excerpts for example would already make things better.

Unfortunately we haven’t had the time to work on such improvements yet. Until we do, I would recommend turning to SNAP if you need that kind of flexibility.

I’ll also answer to the bonus suggestion you added to your other post:

c) Bonus Suggestion: In the Facebook excerpt, the Jetpack Publicize does place a link to the actual article, but that link should be preceded by something like, “READ MORE:” to make it a lot more obvious.

We’ve discussed removing the link completely, actually, as one can already get to the post by clicking on the post preview. You can follow our progress on this here:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/5384

Unfortunately I don’t have a better work-around or solution for you right now. We’re definitely aware that Publicize could be a lot better if it were more flexible and more customizable, but we haven’t had the time to work on such changes yet. When we do, we’ll let you know on this thread, and in the issues I linked to above!

Thanks again for the feedback!

Jeremy — A big “thank you” for your cogent and detailed response. It means a lot as I use WordPress and train others on how to leverage their sites/blogs in fundamental ways.

Some view Jetpack as bloat but I don’t. There are too many great features to use and its connection to Automattic means security for those features and the addition of others.

Keep up the great work.