Yesterday, we learned the ins and outs of pushing your new posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Today, we continue our tour of the Publicize universe with the three other social networks you can connect to from your WordPress.com account: LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Path.
The ability to share your content with different audiences quickly and easily will help you cultivate a healthy readership. Just as important, with Publicize you can tweak your sharing preferences so that each post reaches its intended destination: you can always choose which services to publish to, and what custom message to include (if any).
You can connect to these three services in exactly the same way, and from the exact same page, as the ones discussed yesterday. Simply visit Settings ? Sharing in your dashboard, click “Connect” on the desired one, and authenticate your account in the window that opens. Once you’re done, you’ll see all the social networks you’ve connected to in every new post’s Publish module.
All linked up
LinkedIn is by now much more than a professional networking site. It’s a major content hub in its own right, with movers and shakers from every possible sector sharing their ideas and connecting with like-minded thinkers.
If you’ve decided to connect your WordPress.com site to your LinkedIn account, you can use it to increase your visibility within your professional circles, or join interesting discussions with other people in your field (or in any field, for that matter). For bloggers who often write about work-related themes, this is often a natural step to take.
The best part? If you occasionally publish posts that are more suited to be shared with friends or fellow bloggers than with potential employers, all you have to do is uncheck the LinkedIn box in the Publish module. While public posts are visible to anyone who’s visiting your site, you nonetheless control the content associated with your profile on LinkedIn.
Curate, collect, and write away
With millions of active users, Tumblr hosts an incredible number of buzzing communities, with a strong focus on the curation of visually striking art, photography, and animation (and, sure, a few gifs for good measure). Many a WordPress.com user has benefitted from connecting an art-filled site or a professional portfolio with a tumblr blog. Aimed for quicker consumption, it lets you expose your work and the content you’ve curated around the web to a different, less text-oriented audience.
Of course, nothing stops you from sharing any content to your Tumblr account. Even if your post contains no images at all, it can still benefit from the added exposure of another venue. A link in your followers’ feed will allow them to visit your blog and explore your content, both old and new.
Share a moment with one click
Path, the most recent addition to the Publicize lineup, lets users create a more intimate social network, as it caps the contacts you can add at 150. This makes it ideal for sharing personal stories, photos, and updates — “moments” that members of your network can enjoy from their smartphones.
Just because your posts will be viewed on a smaller screen doesn’t mean they’ll lose their luster — if you use the image or video post format, the media in question will be resized to fit your contact’s smartphone screen. For longer posts, Path will display an excerpt of the content, with a link to visit your blog for anyone who’d like to read the rest.
We lead multidimensional lives across multiple platforms. With Publicize, you can create a customized sharing experience for all the content you produce. If your WordPress.com site is the hub of your online content creation, Publicize expands your reach into the different corners of your network, making your presence as visible and as accessible as you want it to be.
Filed under: Better Blogging, Features, Social
