We know you value your content and want to share it as widely as possible. The Social modules within the free Jetpack plugin give you new ways to interact with your readers. You can make it easier for them to comment on your posts, and you can add sharing buttons to allow your readers to post your content on various social media sites. By connecting your site to Facebook and Twitter, and allowing your visitors to share the content, you will drive even more traffic to your site.

Let’s take a look at each of the social modules and what they do:

Publicize

The Publicize module alone is worth its weight in gold. With Publicize, you can set up your posts to automatically publish to your Facebook feed or page, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media platforms. These posts will include your Featured Image or another image associated with your post or your site. This is a great time-saver since you don’t have to manually post your links everywhere, and it’s particularly handy when you schedule your posts in advance.

You can also choose not to share individual posts or pages with a simple click.

Jetpack Comments

Jetpack Comments replace the default WordPress comments, and allow your visitors to make a comment on a post or page using one of their social media accounts (like Facebook or Twitter) rather than having to set up a brand new account. This makes it far easier for people to interact with you, which in turn should increase the amount of comments and engagement you’ll see on your site.

Gravatar Hovercards

Gravatar Hovercards appear when someone hovers over a comment on your blog. If the commenter has a Gravatar account, the hovercard will provide more details on them, making it easy to find their website or learn a little about their background. This makes your site feel a little more friendly and personal, which again will help to increase visitor engagement.

Likes

With Jetpack Likes, people can like a post or page on your site in a way that’s similar to how Likes work on other social media. This gives readers a quick way to express their interest in your content if they don’t have a comment to add. All likes (with small profile photos) display under the posts.

Sharing

The Sharing module adds different “share this” buttons at the bottom of your pages and posts, allowing your readers an easy way to send your content to their own social media feeds. This is a fantastic way to attract additional readers to your site as well as encourage people to help your content go viral! With the Sharing buttons, you can choose which services to include, and you can even allow a “send to email” or “print” option if you wish.

Subscriptions

With Subscriptions, you get two powerful options in one module. The first option allows you to include notifications for people who leave comments, so they can follow comments on a post (or get a notification when someone responds to their comment). The second option gives you a Subscribe widget allowing people to follow your blog and receive notifications when you post new content. This helps to ensure people don’t lose track of your site after they visit it the first time.

WP.me shortlinks

Shortlinks put your long post URLs on a diet. Instead of the lengthy URLs that WordPress automatically generates for each new post or page, the shortlinks give you a much shorter address that you can use on Twitter or anywhere else where you need to keep things brief.

How to get Social Modules on your Site
If you don’t already have Jetpack, you’ll need to install and activate the plugin on your WordPress site. For each of the modules above, to use that module on your site you’ll need to activate it within Jetpack first. To do so, go to the Jetpack settings in your site’s Dashboard and activate the modules you’d like to use. From there, some modules are ready to go immediately, while others may need some individual configuration.