A long time ago, Jetpack’s Publicize feature—which automatically posts to your social media platforms when you publish a new post—started attaching an image to your tweets to help them catch people’s attention.
At the time, a tweet with a picture would perform better than a tweet with just a link.
This is all fine and good, but a lot has changed since Jetpack started doing that. Twitter cards, if nothing else, not only were developed but were opened up to all (remember when you used to have to opt-in?). When you attach media, that’s the “special” part of your tweet. The Twitter Card, rendered from the meta tags on your post, is not displayed.
Today, effective for all versions of Jetpack and all WordPress.com sites, Publicize will no longer attach a picture to your tweet, instead allowing Twitter to display the Twitter card it renders.
If you want to return to the old way and are on Jetpack 8.5 (released today) or WordPress.com Business, you can add a small code snippet to change it.
add_filter( 'jetpack_publicize_options', function( $option ) {
$option['attach_media'] = true;
return $option;
} );
This filter will, in the end, notify WordPress.com’s server of your preference and use it for future Publicize posts.
Questions about Jetpack’s Publicize feature? There is a team of Happiness Engineers ready to help!
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