Publicize ignoring Custom Text on Facebook

Here are resources you can use to see what is happening:

WordPress site is https://mitchellalerts.com/
Facebook page is https://facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/

I see no reply on this issue. Nobody?

Here is some things I tried to do to self-diagnose this.

I reset the connection to Facebook, which didn’t seem to help any. Also, the wp.me shortlinks seems to not be working either, I don’t know what’s going on there. I deactivated and reactivated that.

Setting custom text seems to put custom at the beginning of whatever I post, but it still puts whatever is in the body of the message after that.

Thanks for any help you can provide about this!

I got the same problem since today.

I’m having the same issues. The issues started up this morning. I shot the team an email so I’m waiting to see what they have to say.

One of my colleagues pointed out that this had just started happening with our site/fb page this morning as well. I disabled/re-enabled Publicize and also removed and re-added the facebook link just to see if that cleared it. No luck ??

Thanks for the info guys. This started for me yesterday. Glad to know I’m not the only one! I’ve quit using Publicize and manually posting my stories over to Facebook for the time being.

Having the same issue. I was sure I didn’t add anything new, so I was confused. What’s going on? Please help us!

Same here – publicize used to post the title and image, nice and neat. Now it posts the first X characters of an article and the image – not so neat. This is worse since I have facebook set to cross-post to Twitter automatically. The tweets make even less sense than the facebook posts.

Thank you all for the reports! Could you please provide me with some additional information so I can investigate further? Please include:

1. A link to the post on your site.

2. A link to the corresponding post on Facebook.

3. The custom text that you included in your Publicize settings before publishing the post.

Just let me know, and I’d be happy to look into this!

1. https://www.nadalnews.com/2015/05/22/rg-pre-tournament-presser-transcript/
2. https://www.facebook.com/NadalNews/posts/976010372443461
3. RG: Pre-tournament presser transcript

This is part of a set of intentional changes we released for Publicize yesterday. The changes are server-side so not as part of Jetpack update. Re-connecting your connections will not have any effect.

We’d be happy to take your opinions into account for further improving the service and how your posts are shared on different social networks.

Can you help me understand why the longer format is not desirable for posts shared on Facebook? Many users have expressed to us that they’d like to have more of their post view-able directly on Facebook.

Thanks for sharing your feedback ??

@miri you specifically mentioned using Facebook to cross-post to Twitter — is there a reason why you don’t use Publicize to directly publish to Twitter? The Publicize feature formats things different for different social networks so using it to post to Twitter directly will yield a cleaner tweet than doing something different.

Can you help me understand why the longer format is not desirable for posts shared on Facebook?

One reason: paragraph breaks are stripped out and the resulting blob of text is a mess. And what’s the point of the custom text field if it’s not used? I use it for a reason. I want to customize the text included in the Facebook post for that medium.

is there a reason why you don’t use Publicize to directly publish to Twitter?

Yes – I post things to Facebook throughout the day that aren’t included on the WordPress site right away. I want those posts to be tweeted. I don’t want posts to the site to tweet out twice, so my only option is to leave control on the cross-posting to twitter on the Facebook side.

(Sorry if I sound grumpy, but it’s annoying to have things change without any warning. If it’s not going back to using the custom field, I’ll simply stop using the feature and will cross-post manually.)

https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592244027690035
https://mitchellalerts.com/?p=941

https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592199127694525
https://mitchellalerts.com/?p=922

I can produce many, many, many, many, many more.

Why is the longer not desirable? Here’s the best way I can describe it. My site is pretty new, but has a large following within my community. Part of the goal is to sell advertising to local businesses to run the site and income for those of us running the site. Things have worked great so far. The title of the post on WordPress goes to Facebook, and then the details are in the actual post, which people click. This allows us to expose users to ads. If Publicize posts the entire post to Facebook, then why would people click the link to read it? They are no longer being exposed to advertisements that they otherwise would have been by going to the page. Also, when I go to “Custom Text” and Publicize adds additional text to the post, then I feel as if the wishes of Custom Text are being ignored, since, text that was not in the Custom Text field is being added to the post.

Here is my suggestion. Push an updated version of JetPack with a newer Publicize where the end user can customize the way that their site pushes content to Facebook. This would give everyone the best of both worlds. Those of us that want short the titles only, get titles only. Those that want more can get more, they are in control.

Example:
%title%
%post%
%post(#)%
%url%

So if someone wants the title and URL, then they could set Publicize up with:

%title% %url%

Then, if someone wants to customize it a little, like how I would really like it to show on my Facebook page, then the end user can modify it to their heart’s content and wishes.

%title%

Details: %url%

See this link for an example of how this modified code would look: https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592234997690938

Or if someone wants the entire post from Publicize to Facebook:

%post%

%url%

Or if someone only wants, say the first 300 characters of an their post,

%post(300)%

%url%

I think you see where I’m going here, and quite honestly, this is how you should handle it. That way each person can decide how Publicize interacts with Facebook. Then if someone goes to Custom Text, then that would COMPLETELY override their Publicize settings and the Custom Text would be posted to Facebook instead. No additional data added to the post, or any stripped.

Agree that being able to create templates would be ideal. I cannot imagine anyone wanting this kind of a jumble for a post:
https://www.facebook.com/NadalNews/posts/976124535765378

Where’s my heading? My paragraph tags? My article link? (That was stripped out and instead a link to the site was auto-generated – which is not helpful at all). It’s a completely unreadable mess. The post this is linking too is crammed full of enough info (and a bit of a mess, I admit) – seems like the cross-posted blurb should at least be succinct.

Thanks for your feedback so far. It’s appreciated and helps us guide the service towards the right decisions.

Having the ability to customize using template(s) is something that has been suggested before and that we will implement eventually. Unfortunately I don’t have an ETA for that at the moment.

You can follow along or provide additional feedback here: https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/261

I agree with you that we should be using your custom description — even if we did add additional content from the post. I’ll push out an improvement shortly.