Once you’ve got your WooCommerce store up and running, the next important step is to promote it – so you can reach your target group and maximize your sales and revenue.
And Instagram is an excellent platform for businesses like you to showcase their products, different use cases, and customer reviews.
That’s not it. Whether you’re planning to start an Instagram page for your store or already have one, you can increase the impact of your Instagram content – by using social media feed plugins.
Allowing you to display Instagram posts on your website, these plugins take Instagram’s power to highlight your store and products to boost your sales up a notch.
This article will explore five such plugins that will help you add content from Instagram to your website and use it to its full potential. But first, let’s understand what social media feed plugins do and how they can help you.
How do social media feed plugins work?
Social media feed plugins allow you to embed your social media feed (in our case, your Instagram feed) on your website – and this offers many benefits.
Given that it’s a visual platform, Instagram photos are generally more vibrant and of better quality – and showing them on your website can enhance its visual appeal.
Moreover, Instagram locks all your amazing posts behind a login screen. But with social media feed plugins, you can bypass this and make your content visible to even non-Instagram users through your website.
Some more ways they help are:
- You can display posts made by your customers to add social proof to your website. This can help build credibility and nudge new shoppers into buying your products, thus boosting sales.
- Having an Instagram feed on your website can increase engagement and a user’s session duration – as people might stay on your website for longer to go through all your photos.
- They help expand the reach of your Instagram posts and turn website visitors into followers.
All in all, adding your Instagram feed to your website can give shoppers a better picture of your brand, build trust, and help you win more sales.
Now, let’s explore some of the best Instagram feed plugins that can help you achieve all this.
Top plugins to leverage Instagram and boost WooCommerce sales
WooCommerce Instagram
WooCommerce Instagram’s primary goal is to help you upload your catalogue on Instagram and create shoppable posts and stories. But it doesn’t stop there.
The plugin also lets you showcase Instagram photos posted by your customers directly on your product pages. All you have to do is create a product hashtag (from its settings) and ask your customers to use it when they post about the product.
Then, images tagged with that hashtag will automatically show up on the concerned product’s page. Besides pushing user-generated content (UGC), this can also help you build credibility among new shoppers and thus, increase sales.
The plugin gives you the freedom to choose the number of images and columns to show and which images to display – recent ones, top ones (with most likes, comments, etc.), or both.
Overall, by helping you set up Instagram Shopping and use Instagram content on your website, the plugin serves a dual purpose and makes itself a top choice.
Top feature: You can set what images to display globally or individually for each product.
Pricing: $79/year with 1-year updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
EmbedSocial
EmbedSocial’s WordPress Instagram Feeds is a great plugin to showcase your Instagram content and create an Instagram gallery of sorts on your website.
It doesn’t only let you display images you post but also those posted by other Instagram users that mention your brand or hashtags.
Moreover, it comes with more than ten layouts, so you can choose how to display posts. You can also customize the Instagram widget’s title, colors, image size, padding, etc., so it fits your website’s look and theme.
Besides offering rich customization features, it also lets you control which posts to display. So, you can choose to only show posts that contain specific keywords, hide certain posts, pin a post to always display it first, and more.
That’s not it – you can also make the embedded Instagram feed shoppable by adding a “Buy” button to each post. This lets you send users straight to checkout when they click on a particular product’s image.
Once you’re done designing, copy the shortcode it creates and paste it wherever you want the widget to show.
Top feature: It also gives you analytics on your Instagram widget’s performance – you can see which posts perform the best and how many people click on the feed on your website.
Pricing: Offers a free version with limited features; paid plans start at $24/month (billed annually).
Spotlight
Feature-rich and lightweight, Spotlight lets you embed Instagram feeds on your website and display your posts – and even those where users tagged your account or used your hashtags.
It offers templates like Grid and Masonry, so you can choose how to show posts. You can also customize your Instagram feed’s look by changing the background color, space between images, font sizes, hover-over effects, profile picture, bio, etc. It even lets you show your follower, like, and comment count to build credibility further.
While it creates responsive feeds by default, you can also tweak your feed’s design for every device. For example, you can go for 3 columns of images on the desktop, 2 on the tablet, and 1 on mobiles.
It lets you filter posts by hashtags and captions – so, for instance, you can hide posts that contain specific words in their captions. But what’s even better is that you can also visually moderate your feed – you can handpick the posts you want to show/hide, and it’ll create your feed accordingly.
As with EmbedSocial, it too lets you link posts to product pages to boost conversions. You can even add a “Follow” button with the feed, so your site visitors can follow your Instagram page.
Top feature: It shows a live preview while you’re designing your feed. So, you don’t have to go back and forth between the backend and frontend and can see how your feed will look right from the dashboard.
Pricing: Free version comes with limited features; Spotlight PRO starts at $49/year.
Feed Them Social
Although it doesn’t provide as many customization features, Feed Them Social is simple to use and helps you get the job done just the same.
What makes it stand out is that this one plugin lets you pull content from different social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter – and create different feeds for each.
You can create as many social feeds as you want and embed them in pages, posts, or even the sidebar.
Again, you can choose the number of posts and columns to show, the gallery height and width, the image padding, and whether to add a “Like” or “Follow” button with the feed. You can even choose whether to show header information (like your account’s bio and followers) and the likes and comments on posts.
The best part is, all feeds are fully responsive. If you choose not to force the number of columns configured on smaller devices, it’ll automatically reduce them based on a user’s device.
Top feature: Users praise its support team for their promptness.
Pricing: Free version comes with limited features; Premium starts at $50/year for 1 site.
Instagram Feed Pro
Smash Balloon’s Instagram Feed WordPress plugin is a great tool to use your Instagram content on your website.
All you need to do is log into your Instagram account, and the plugin manages the rest. Don’t believe us? Hear this: the plugin is made to inherit your website’s fonts, colors, and styles – so it creates a feed that suits your website right out of the box.
However, you can still customize the design (by changing the feed width, layout, number of columns and images, header and hover style, etc.) to create a feed that best matches your needs.
It lets you display posts from your account or those that use a specific hashtag (and create a hashtag feed). The latter is a great way to show UGC and how customers talk about your brand.
Like Spotlight, it also lets you pick and choose the posts you want to include in your feed (visual moderation) and even filter posts based on hashtags or words they contain.
What’s more, the feeds it creates are fully responsive – they can adapt to your screen’s size and are touch-screen compatible.
Top feature: Its smart backing system means that your posts continue to show on your website even if Instagram faces an outage. Moreover, it doesn’t slow down your website.
Pricing: Currently starts at $49/year (with 1-year updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.)
Conclusion
Instagram is an excellent marketing tool in itself. But social media feed plugins allow you to fully utilize the content you post there – to improve your website, add social proof, and boost sales.
That said, the best and most straightforward way to leverage Instagram for your WooCommerce store is to sell directly on the platform – using Instagram Shopping.
Shopify merchants can get started with it in just a few steps, right from their store’s admin. If only WooCommerce merchants got the same option.
Will WooCommerce take up the challenge? Only time will tell!