Updated 11 March 2021.

Copyright: European Union Public License, version 1.2 (EUPL-1.2).

Introduction.

WordPress allows to publish your posts directly on some Social Media platforms after you have connected your website to your social media account. Sounds great and simple enough? Wrong.

It doesn’t work. Result is totally inconsistent.

We’re using it with Twitter, with the sole aim of allowing our stakeholders to follow the updates on our many websites. The feature is under:

WP Admin -> Settings -> Sharing -> Publicise Settings -> Connect your account.

You’ll find below this article all the testing we’ve done.

TL;DR:

Only the Title will show up in your Tweet. So you have to work around this bug.

Step 1:

Open a new post, write your content all in the title only, including any URL. Leave the content empty at this point. You can put a featured image.

Example:

Step 2:

Click on “Publish”. Fill the “customise content” but you can’t be sure it will be published at the top of your Tweet, sometimes only the title appears, twice.

Step 3:

Check on your Twitter account that your post has been published. Sometimes the content you put in the Title will show up both at the top of the Tweet AND in the Tweet link. Sometimes the custom message will appear at the top of your Tweet and the title as a content of your tweet. Head and Tail. Any URL will be clickable. Clicking on this Tweet will take the reader to the post on your website. If you’ve added a featured image, it may show up.

Example:

Step 4:

Now, it’s time to update your post and write it as it should have been, with a correct title and its content. This time when you click “Update”, nothing will be sent to Twitter. So your readers will land on a correctly published post.

Example:

Testing.

We’ve done extensive testing to try to understand what was going wrong with this feature and how to get around it.

Test 1:

• Testing with one title, one content and one custom message.
• Result: We see the custom message at the top of the Tweet and the Title in the post. We DO NOT see the content. However, on subsequent tests, the custom message would NOT show up, so this is not reliable.

Screenshots:

Test 2:

• Testing with the message all as a title, no content. We added a custom message.
• Result: We see only the tile in the Tweet, both at the top and in the content.

Screenshots:

Test 3:

• Testing with the message all as a title and no Custom Message.
• Result: We see the content of the title both a the top of the Tweet AND in the content of the Tweet.

Screenshots:

Test 4:

• Testing with a content only, no title and no custom message.
• Result. Tweet is empty, bot at the top and inside.

Screenshots:

Test 5:

• Testing with No title, one content and one custom message.
• Result: The custom message appears at the top, the Tweet is empty but if you click on it it takes you to the website’s post. This could be the best option if only it was consistent.

Screenshots:

Test 6:

• Testing with one title, one content, one custom message and one featured image. We took a screenshot of the content to use it as the featured image.
• Result: It doesn’t show the featured image. Only the custom content at the top of the Tweet and the title in the Tweet. Using another image, when posting about Wire in Open Collective, the featured image showed up. So you can use a featured image, but not to put text in it.

Screenshots:

Test 7:

• Testing with several titles and a custom message.
• Result: Only Title 1 will show up in the Tweet, both at the top and in the content. Custom message doesn’t show up.

Screenshots: