You can add a social media feed to your website with a free app. This allows you to get even more views of your social media content, whether you want to use the feed for announcements, sale promos, or simply for branded content.
In this guide, we show you different types of social media feeds and free apps to add a feed to your website.
What's in this guide:
- Why add a social media feed to your site?
- 5 free social media feeds for your website
- 10 examples of social media feeds
- 9 types of content to aggregate
- 7 free social media feed apps
- 5 social media feed templates to try
- Benefits of using free social media feeds on your website
- Tips to improve the style and results
Why add a social media feed to your site?
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all enable small and large businesses alike to connect with their customers in a more personal and direct way. However, not all of your customers are aware of your social media presence.
They might not know that you post pictures of events or customers using your product on Instagram.
So why not show off your best content by embedding your social media feeds directly to your website? Since you can do this for free, it's a no-brainer.
In this example from Dover Saddlery, we see customer-submitted images from Facebook and Instagram right on their website home page. Customers are encouraged to join in the fun by posting with branded hashtags.
This allows a seamless connection between social media and your site, leading to even more organic traffic. Your website fans will engage with your content, and follow you, growing your audience across all your favorite platforms.
In this post, we shall explore free social media feeds and third-party tools you can use to build your brand and remain in touch with your customers.
Curator.io is an easy-to-customize aggregator that lets you pull from over a dozen sources. If you'd like to give Curator.io's free forever plan a spin sign up today.
5 free social media feeds for your website
Social media networks are free to use. This means that when you use a free tool like Curator.io to embed the social media feed in your site, you don't have to pay any one-time or monthly fees to implement this.
Here are some examples of free social media feeds.
1. TikTok feed
TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media networks and is very popular with Generation Z and Millennials. You can add your TikTock feed to your website so that all new posts automatically appear.
Here's an example feed from a eco living content creator.
2. Facebook feed
In this example USA Track & Field shares their Facebook posts right on their website.
Facebook is a great place for potential customers to find information about your business. Feeds stream posts (including video and photos) from your Facebook business page on to your site. This means that all the visitors to your site get to see your activity on Facebook without having to leave your website or search for it.
3. Instagram feed
Check out this example from TimberTech, a company which embeds their Instagram posts straight in their site.
Most Instagram apps are 100% flexible. This means that you have the option of having your Instagram feed cover your entire page. Another great feature is a pop up with all the detailed information of each image such as caption, comments, likes, and hashtags. This feature brings the look and feels of Instagram to your website and can help drive sales.
4. Twitter feed
To keep city residents on top of the latest news, the City of Riverside embeds their tweets in their website.
Twitter is a great way to connect with your audience. You can even gain a few more followers by embedding your Twitter feed to your website.
With a Twitter feed, you do not have to worry about the blue color not matching your brands color scheme. You can customize the app to look just as you want it to. You can also customize the layout styling and borders. What is more, the app has an even more impressive feature that allows you to add your own JS and CSS.
5. Pinterest feed
Blogger Leonie Hanne makes the most of her social media content by embedding her pins.
Other than images and recipes, there is a ton of curated content on Pinterest. You can quickly gather valuable information such as inspirational quotes, images, and other exciting content by following thought leaders in your area.
If you don't have a media-rich site, embedding your Pinterest feed is a really smart and easy way to add images.
9 types of content to aggregate
There are so many different types of content that you can aggregate on your website. You can pull in testimonials from customers, share your company announcements, or add all of your social media content from across all of your content categories.
These are the most popular types of social media feeds to consider:
- Hashtags: You can aggregate content from a specific hashtag and add it to your website. This is great for capturing a variety of brand-specific content.
- Customer reviews: You can also aggregate customer reviews. Pull content that mentions or tags your brand. Then check for positive reviews only, and approve them to be added to your website.
- User generated content: User generated content (UGC) refers to content that your customers or audience creates, such as when someone shares a picture of their manicure and tags the brand of nail polish they're using. You can aggregate UGC in a social media feed on your website to show off examples of your products being used in real life.
- Portfolio samples: Social media feeds are also great for making portfolio sections. Let's say you're a graphic artist. You can add your Instagram posts with examples of your work to your website and add a headline above like "See samples of my work."
- Announcements: Social media feeds are also great for company or organization announcements. If you're already making these announcements on social media, you might as well embed them on your website to further their reach.
- Event promotion: You can also use a social media feed to promote an upcoming event. Share pictures of the speakers, venue, and other details and embed this content on your website.
- Live events: Social media feeds can also be used to share content from events happening live. For instance, a conference might aggregate content from a branded hashtag and share this on their website and live television screens during the event.
- Behind-the-scenes: Social media feeds are great for sharing all sorts of behind-the-scenes content. Let's say a small business owner or artisan likes to share their creative process on social media. They can aggregate this content and embed it on their website to boost engagement and conversions.
- Location-specific: Cities and regions can use social media feeds to aggregate images and videos of their location. This is useful for encouraging tourism to a certain area and promoting all that it has to offer.
7 free social media feed apps
So now that we've seen plenty of examples, it's time to look at our options for embedding social media content for free.
These are the top choices:
1. Curator.io
Curator allows you to specify content sources such as Instagram tags and Twitter usernames. It then aggregates this content into a feed that you can embed on your website.
The best things about Curator.io when comparing it to other social media aggregators are...
- No visible Curator.io branding dominating your feed even when using their free plan (just a small link at the bottom)
- Over a dozen sources to choose from
- Gives you the most amount of feeds and sources on the free plan
Curator allows you to embed the feeds directly as HTML which you just copy and past. This gives you total control over the appearance of your feed and allowing you to customize so it with your business's branding.
Curator supports several social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Google+, Tumblr, Vine, and RSS.
All you have to do to set it up is:
- Select the source you want to pull from (such as an Instagram account or hashtag)
- Choose how you want to approve posts, whether automatically approve all or individually approve the ones you want to display
- Choose the look and style of your feed
- Copy the HTML code where you want it in your site (website section, side bar, etc.)
While embedding the above social feeds is a no-brainer using Curator.io, you may also consider these other options, though they don't provide as elegant and attractive feeds as the examples above.
2. Social Media Stream
This app is a good choice for you if you would like to aggregate all your social feeds into one. This widget is designed for Wix websites. With Social Media Stream, you can display all your networks in one neat and organized widget. The app allows you to add your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr blog, and Youtube channel or playlist.
Adding the feed is as simple as adding your profile URL. You can also customize the colors layout and design to suit your brand.
3. My Reviews
Most people read several reviews of a business before they transact with them. In fact, 90% of people read reviews before engaging with a business. When people hear about your business, they will search for as many reviews as possible and read them before they buy from you. Having star-based reviews embedded can increase conversions by 17% or more.
My Reviews helps you to add any valuable reviews about your website from Google or Facebook. Your readers are able to access all the information they need on your site without having to leave.
Keeping your audience on your site not only gives them valuable information about your brand, but it also keeps them engaged on your site, which leads to further interaction. Offering your business's reviews on your website is a sign of transparency, and it helps in increasing trust. After all, if you're not hiding your reviews, you're not hiding anything else.
Consider using this feed in additional to other free social media feeds to give visitors even more information about your brand in one place.
If you’re not using social media to its fullest extent, you’re losing younger consumers, who are the future of eCommerce.
4. Juicer
Juicer is a good option for adding a social media feed to your website. It works with Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook. If you want to pull content from other social media networks, try Curator (which integrats with over a dozen networks).
5. Taggbox
Taggbox offers social media feed embedding as well as advanced UGC features, making this a great platform for ecommerce companies or other brands that want to filter, moderate, approve, and embed content from their customers.
6. Tagembed
Tagembed is an affordable, simple-to-use social media feed aggregator. It offers a large amount of integrations for social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest. Plus, it connects with customer review platforms so you can embed reviews as well: Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Etsy, Yelp, Capterra.
7. Walls.io
Creating a social media feed with Walls.io is a straightforward process. You can aggregate content from various social media platforms and display them in a single, customizable feed. Walls.io is a great option for events managers because it includes event-specific features like polls, photo booths, and live social walls.
10 examples of social media feeds
Check out these great examples of real social media feeds on a variety of websites, from small businesses to large organizations.
1. Dave Blunden Staircases: Portfolio samples
Dave Blunden is an experienced carpenter specializing in designing, supplying, and installing staircases. The company's website includes an Instagram feed with examples of their work. This is like killing two birds with one stone. You use your feed to share your portfolio both on social media and on your website.
2. Home LeadGen: Company announcements and team photos
Home LeadGen is a marketing agency that works with clients across a variety of industries. They include a social media feed on their website to keep people informed of company announcements and provide some team photos and behind-the-scenes peeks.
3. House Belfast: Instagram posts to set the scene
House Belfast uses their embedded social media feed to add high-quality imagery to their website. They set the scene with restaurant, bar, and hotel photos. These pics invite website visitors to come visit in real life and stay awhile.
4. Synthesis: Customer review tweets
Synthesis is a virtual afterschool program that teaches problem-solving. They have a social media feed on their website with tweets from parents. These tweets are all positive reviews of the program. You can create a social media feed like this one by choosing account mentions and using a manual approval style (and making sure to only approve positive mentions).
5. Refunds Manager: Twitter posts with blogs and customer reviews
Refunds Manager is a third-party fee-auditing service for Amazon sellers. With their Twitter feed, they feature links to recent blog posts as well as customer review images sourced from Trustpilot.
6. Gulf County Florida Tourism: User generated content
The Visit Gulf website is the hub for Gulf County Florida Tourism. They use their social media feed to feature user-generated content from top-notch photographers and influencers. It's a smart way to source content for your website! Take their example and come up with a custom hashtag, then ask people to use it in their photos of your business or region.
7. 37 Dawson Street: Instagram feed
37 Dawson Street is a late-night bar and restaurant in Dublin. With their social media feed, they showcase images and videos of their location. This helps showcase the delicious offerings and encourages people to come in for a drink.
8. Atkins: Recipes and inspiration
Atkins offers low-card weight loss plans and products. They have a section on their website to showcase their social media content. It includes not only a social media feed with recipes and inspiration, but also links to follow them on all of their accounts.
9. Monash University: School news
Monash University is a top-ranked college in pharmacy and pharmacology. With their social media feed, they keep website visitors informed of university news and faculty and student accomplishments.
10. Jungmaven: Featured products and memes
With their social media feed, hemp clothing brand Jungmaven adds a lot of fun, fresh content to their website. They include images of models and influencers wearing their products, plus lots of on-brand memes that make their website more engaging.
5 social media feed templates to try
When adding a social media feed to your website, it's smart to use templates. With a single click, you can change the template and update the entire look and feel of your feed—all without having to custom code.
Below, we showcase 5 popular feed templates:
1. Waterfall
The Waterfall feed shows as many posts as you want. You can have a single row or multiple rows, for a long flow of content. It also showcases the post text alongside the images and videos, making it a great fit for you if you want to include your captions on your website.
2. Grid
With the grid style, you get square images and video previews. Captions aren't shown automatically, but will appear over each post when someone hovers over them.
3. Carousel
What makes the Carousel template stand out is the arrows. Website visitors can use the arrows to scroll through content and see more posts. You can choose to include captions or not. If you do include captions, you can set the max number of text lines (here we have it set to 3 lines of text).
4. Mosaic
With the Mosaic feed template, your social media posts are automatically arranged into an artistic mosaic, with some posts large and others small. This is great for fitting a larger number of posts in a small amount of space.
5. Stack
The Stack social media feed template "stacks" your posts one on top of the other. Users can click the arrows to flip to the next post in the stack. This template is great for improving readability and engagement with individual posts, as only one post is featured at a time.
Benefits of using free social media feeds on your website
Social media feeds aren't difficult to implement. Plus, with all the free tools available, there's no reason not to at least try them to see how your site's visitors react. In most cases, you'll find they're a welcome addition and make your site a one-stop shop for everything related to your brand.
Some of the top benefits include:
- They help increase brand awareness and generate leads.
- They help boost your rankings on Google search by showing that you are continually updating your site. This is just one of many proven ways to boost your rank for free.
- Keeps visitors on your website and increase engagement levels.
- Encourages people to follow you.
- Saves you time adding new content to your site.
- Collects all your social media profiles in one place to help you monitor content.
- It increases your content reach.
- Helps you connect with customers by featuring their content.
As you can see, the benefits have the potential to help you grow your brand with minimal effort.
Tips to improve the style and results
Social media feeds are meant to get people to click on your website by creating buzz around your business. Therefore, just embedding the free feeds we have discussed in this post on your website is not enough. You have to ensure that your audience actually engages your content. Here are several tips to help you get more engagement with your social media feeds:
- Keep relevant content that will interest your audience. Consistently add fresh content to social media and consider bringing in content from relevant brands and influencers too.
- Hashtag all your content with your business name to makes it easier to find. Make sure the hashtag is unique to your business.
- Share interesting ideas with your customers and ask for their feedback. Customers love to be included. Get them talking and you'll extend your reach.
- Include a call to action in your content to encourage people to share it. People love to share content they enjoy. If you're sharing great content with them, encourage them to share it with others.