If you would like to keep your website updated easily, then you should embed a social media feed on your website. One way to do this is to use each platform’s proprietary embedding option. However, often those aren’t flexible enough for brands, especially when you want to display content from various different social media sites. A better option is to embed a social wall on your website.
It can display content from multiple platforms and gives you plenty of customisation options that Twitter, Instagram or Facebook widgets just don’t have. Even if you use only one network, a social media feed still offers you so much more.
Let’s be honest, keeping a website up-to-date is incredibly hard work, and in many businesses, it can fall to the wayside. Meanwhile, we’re already used to regularly updating our social media accounts, both personal and professional. It’s quick, easy to do, and we enjoy sharing content.
So if you’re already spending time and effort on posting to your social channels, why not make it go a little further?
By displaying social media content — content that you’re already posting anyway — on your website, you can easily keep your website content fresh and engage your audience.
It’s undeniable that there are great advantages to embedding your social media posts on your website. But now, let’s have a look at why a social media feed easily outperforms a one-platform widget.
Create a social feed with videos and posts collected from multiple social media channels and embed it on your website to engage your visitors.
With a social wall, you are fully in control of the content you’re showing on your embedded website widget.
For one, you can collect more types of social media content. With a platform plugin, you’re limited to embedding your brand’s posts only. But with a social feed, you can collect content based on hashtags and keywords as well. You can show posts by other people, for example, those using your brand hashtag.
You can also be more specific about which posts to show. Rather than just including your whole feed, you can exclude posts by using filters or keywords. That way you can adapt your social feed to the page you’re embedding it on.
Keep calm and moderate your posts
It can be a bit nerve-wracking when you choose to show posts from other people on your website, but that’s where post moderation comes in. A social wall offers you various moderation settings that give you full content control.
You can use filters and keywords to adapt your feed. A fully customisable blocklist and spam filter help keep unwanted posts far away from your social media feed, so you don’t have to worry about problematic content being shown on your website.
If you only use one social media network, you can sometimes get by with that network’s plugin to embed your posts. But as soon as you want to display content from various networks, you’re stuck.
Should you separately embed feeds for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and who knows what else, your website is quickly going to get cluttered up with widgets. Multiple widgets will also slow down your website, and it’ll take longer to load.
Instead, a social feed puts all of the social media content you want to display in one feed. It’s easy to switch out the sources and adapt the content that is displayed as the seasons go by.
Create your own content mix
One huge benefit of a website social media feed is that you can add multiple social media sources using the social media aggregator features. But it doesn’t have to end there.
With our Pro and Premium plans, you can even upload your own content directly on the wall or use Direct Posts to allow users to upload content themselves. Don’t worry about it, you can control all incoming content from a moderation panel. High-end social media feed tools like Walls.io, for example, offer that.
You can fully control the content you upload and completely circumvent your social media channels. Create your own content mix, perfectly balanced for your brand.
With a proprietary widget, you’re usually stuck with very few design options, if at all. But a social wall can be customised extensively to fit various use cases, brand colours, display options, etc.
Get the right theme
Walls.io has a bunch of different Themes that have been created specifically for different use cases. Our two main website widget themes, for example, are Fluid and Grid. Fluid looks great as a full-page display, while Grid lends itself well to creating a slim widget in your sidebar.
The Memphis Grizzlies, for example, embed different social feeds on different websites, as well as their app. Each social wall is adapted to whichever page it’s shown on. Here we see a version where the social media feed is kept neatly in a sidebar.
For brands with a global reach, it can make sense to go for our Map theme, which displays social media posts on a world map. For a more photo-focused website embed, the Bricks theme can also work really well.
It’s easy to change up the look and behaviour of the social wall in the Walls.io Dashboard, switching between different themes and editing the display properties according to how you want to display your widget.
What’s more, is that you can adapt the look of your social feed to fit your website. Use your official brand colours to design your social wall instead of being stuck with Facebook’s shade of blue or a boring version in white.
Upload a fancy background for your social wall. Customise how posts are displayed, set up auto-scrolling and choose how to sort your posts. You can even use CSS to customise the look of your widget further.
Plan International Australia has adapted the colours of the social feed to fit perfectly with the brand colours on the website. The design of the embed more or less “disappears” into the website, providing a seamless content experience.
With a Walls.io social feed, you have multiple embedding options. You can use the iFrame or JavaScript option — it’s easy to grab the code from the Embed & Display menu. You can choose whether you want your widget to be fixed or responsive and fiddle around with various advanced settings. Copy the code and insert it on your website.
For those who use WordPress, there’s a plugin that makes everything even easier. Simply install the plugin on your WordPress site, copy your social wall URL and paste it into the plugin.
This is obviously specific to Walls.io, but since we are an Austrian company, we are an EU service, and our servers are housed in the EU as well. The content you pull in through your social wall comes from our Content Delivery Network. So it comes from an EU server and not from Facebook, Twitter, etc.
This is something that many of our customers, especially in the German-speaking market, feel better about because it makes GDPR compliance easier for them.
The Best Social Media Feed Tool
Social Media Feed on Website Examples
How to Embed a Social Media Feed on Your Website
Final thoughts
Social media feeds are built to make it easier for you to display your social media content on your website. They’re customisable and flexible solutions for the requirements many brands have.
The advantages of a social media feed far outperform those of proprietary widgets. Even if you use only one network, the customisation and content moderation options very much are worth it.