Instagram has over 700 millions of active users and tons of user-generated content. Moreover, it develops faster than any other social network. So why not use this huge audience for the sake of your WordPress website? And there is the tool for this purpose — Grace Instagram Feed Gallery for WordPress!
Grace is the part of Social Stream Apps project, which is dedicated to the development of next-generation plugins for social streaming. In case you do not know what is “social streaming” — it is the new opportunity to seamlessly connect any social network with your WordPress website by means of automatically updated feed (or combination of nearly unlimited number of feeds).
What does this plugin allow you to create and why is it important? Let us dive into Grace and explore the most interesting features and the goals they achieve.
Public Content Streaming from Instagram
Grace Instagram Feed Gallery has an unlimited access to any public content of this social network. It means you can aggregate any public posts from Instagram. This opportunity is provided by Grace Instagram App approved by Instagram (considering the vital changes from June 1, 2016). With such access to public Instagram content you do not even need your own app and tokens to have full access to public content. All you need is to find interesting Instagram accounts or hashtags to add them to your feeds in Grace.
If you have some experience with API connection to a WordPress website, you may think that this process will take plenty of time and effort. But this previous experience has nothing common with Grace. The plugin offers you to push only one button on the Authorization tab of WordPress admin panel and confirm the authorization in Instagram. That is all — API connected successfully. Do not believe? Try it yourself! (Grace is a premium WordPress plugin, but you can use free trial version to have a feel of key plugin’s features.)
Instagram Feed Types to Stream
There are 5 types of feeds, which you can use the sources of user-generated content from Instagram: user account, likes timeline, hashtag, location ID and location coordinates. These sources can help you to create any type of social stream — from entertainment purposes to brand marketing and awareness. Let us take a closer look at each feed type and their possible use cases.
User account feed is the most straight-forward way to stream Instagram content. You simply choose interesting open (public) accounts and add their feeds to your stream. Nevertheless, such feeds can be used both for your hobby spotlights (for example, a stream that gathers all Instagram account dedicated to Star Wars universe) and your personal or corporate brand promotion (for example, you can create branded Instagram account and use it as an additional source of engagement for your audience).
Likes timeline presents an ample opportunity to stream everything you like from Instagram. Strictly saying, you will get any liked post right to your social stream with like timeline feed. Again, you can use specially created account to build a social wall with certain purpose: increasing brand awareness, choosing positive testimonials right from Instagram and so on.
Hashtag feed opens up an opportunity to gather disjointed content on one topic. For example, you can monitor good and bad reviews about your brand by its name — and react rapidly. Combined with the pre-moderation feature (about which we will talk a bit later) such feed can work great to connect user-generated content from lots of sources, even those you know nothing about.
Location ID and coordinates are the feeds that can help local business to grow fast and confident. If you are the owner of a cafe, restaurant, barber shop, laundry, car wash, repair service or any other small business, then you should be interested to stream the local events from Instagram by your company’s address. You can also combine this feeds with hashtags to assure the constant updates for your social stream.
You can see all types of Instagram feeds by Grace in the live demo page.
Design and Layouts Options
Grace Instagram Feed Gallery provides you with the choice of 4 different layouts for your perfect social streams: masonry, grid, justified galleries and carousel slider. Each of these layouts can be useful for different purposes — the choice depends mostly on the type of content you are willing to stream. And the great thing is all layouts are 100% responsive.
Masonry layout has the ability to adjust stream design to the height of the photos and pictures. Such type of layout can be seen in other popular social network — Pinterest.
Grid layout fetch all elements to one width and height. This layout is very stylish, but it requires you to use similar post formats to perform in a good shape.
Justified gallery has the same height to create beautiful streams from Instagram. In this case you should also pay attention to the similar post formatting.
Carousel slider allows you to create amazing and very comfortable-to-use layouts. All cards in carousel slider will be fetched to one width and height option.
Moreover, you have a full control for the design of any element inside your social stream. With Styling tab you can adjust colors for regular text, headings, links, background, shadows, icon styles, corners, position, alignment and much more. You can also use custom CSS by means of additional tab in stream settings.
Lightbox Options
Lightbox is an expanded window for each Instagram post from your social stream. And this element has useful tools for reducing the bounce rate of your WordPress website and for increasing the time users spend on it. This tools allow users to view full-sized photo, social activity counters (comments, likes), location of the photo and comments box. The post can also be shared for other social networks right in the lightbox.
Content Filtering
Content filtering is a very useful feature for your WordPress website’s visitors. Typically, you will have more than one feed within your social stream to keep it interesting and instantly updated. With the content filtering feature your users can sort content by clicking on feed buttons on the top of your stream to include or exclude any for their own vision of the stream.
Custom Profile Headers
On the other hand, if you have a branded social stream with only one dedicated feed, Grace Instagram Feed Gallery can offer a special feature for you — the custom profile header. This header will include the main information about your Instagram account: profile avatar, counts for posts, followers and followed accounts, short text presentation of the channel. Such header is similar to the Instagram design, which makes your social stream users more confident about the authorized content you provide.
Premoderation
Premoderation makes your social streaming safe and provide more additional features to build a perfect social wall on a WordPress website. Premodertion can be done both manually and automatically by means of Grace Instagram Feed Gallery plugin. In conjunction with different types of feeds it gives you vast opportunities to create any type of social streams without a fear of inappropriate content from some Instagram accounts, hashtags or locations.
Manual premoderation can be activated for each social feed separately. It means more flexibility for your administration powers. You can add some trusted feeds (for example, your own account) without premoderation and combine them with those which need to be premoderate (for example, some popular hashtags or geolocations).
Automatic premoderation can also be applied to each of your feeds. It has the features for including and excluding certain content by a word, phrase, hashtag, location or account. This means, that you can fine tune both the exclusion of sources you believe are inappropriate for your social stream and the obligatory inclusion of sources you trust. The right combination of exclude and include rules will allow you to create really self-sufficient social stream, which updates automatically.
Conclusion
The prominent features of Grace Instagram Feed Gallery plugin allow you to instantly update any WordPress website with ease and style. You get full control over the social streaming from one of the most popular social networks — from design features to posts premoderation.
Anyone, who is interested in the development of a WordPress website in a modern way, should pay close attention to such social streaming plugins as Grace Instagram Feed Gallery.
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