Strap on Jetpack to make WordPress engagement soar

When I was a kid, I wanted a jetpack. (Truth be told, I also wanted a flying car.) And, while there are some jetpacks available today of the type I envisioned while growing up, the Jetpack we’re going to discuss here is of a slightly different variety.

Jetpack is a bundle of WordPress® plugins that pulls together a number of common extensions that are frequently used in extending a blog’s or website’s capabilities. In fact, the Jetpack bundle includes 30 common features, and has been downloaded more than 10 million times.

There is a lot of stuff in Jetpack, and Julie Deneen over at Fabulous Blogging has written a stellar overview that outlines “Everything You Need (and Don’t) With the Jetpack Plugin.” If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, it’s the definitive place to start.

There are two aspects of Jetpack, however, that warrant an explicit mention here. They both involve customer engagement: the sharing component and the subscriptions component.

Sharing with Jetpack

Creating great content is just the beginning. Its distribution can have as much, or more, impact than the content itself, according to Forbes, BuzzFeed, Forrester and others. Some people, like Derek Halpern of Social Trigger™, even apply the 80/20 rule here — spending 20 percent of their time creating content and 80 percent on promoting, marketing and distributing it.

The Sharing module in Jetpack is an easy way to enable your readers and site visitors to distribute your (great) content on your behalf across channels including Facebook®, Twitter®, StumbleUpon®, Pinterest®, Google+™, LinkedIn® and others.

Subscriptions via Jetpack

You’re super busy, and so are your readers. Especially if you’re not able to post every day, letting them know when there is a new post available is both courteous and a great way to keep people coming back to your site. The Subscriptions module within Jetpack meets this need, alerting readers every time a new post goes live.

The Sharing and Subscriptions modules are just two of the pieces of the Jetpack puzzle focused on engagement. As noted above, if you want a deeper look, check out the “Everything You Need (and Don’t) With the Jetpack Plugin” via BlogHer and Julie Deneen.

Bonus video: For those who really do want to check out a newfangled take on the old-school jetpack, take a peek: