With over one billion users worldwide, Instagram is a powerful social media tool you can use to grow your business. However, using it to boost your digital marketing initiatives requires more than simply creating an account and periodically posting.
Strategically integrating Instagram with your WordPress site can help you drive traffic and increase engagement. Additionally, it can be an effective way to reach new prospects, connect with your target audience, and build brand awareness.
In this post, weβll discuss how social media channels such as Instagram can benefit your WordPress site (and vice versa). Then weβll provide you with three tips for successfully integrating the two platforms. Letβs get started!
The Benefits of Connecting Instagram with WordPress
Social media networks present a plethora of opportunities to enhance your online marketing strategy. As one of the most used image and video sharing platforms today, Instagram serves as a particularly useful tool for capturing attention through visual content.
One of the biggest advantages of establishing a presence on Instagram is that there are many ways to gain visibility among your target audience. As a pillar of influencer marketing, Instagram is a quality platform for running cross-channel promotions, partnership deals, and other branding opportunities.
Many use Instagram, as well as other popular channels such as Facebook and Twitter, as a social search engine. Therefore, strategically using hashtags, geotags, and other Instagram features can heighten the discoverability of your brand. However, turning your social media followers into customers on your WordPress site is much easier when the channels are aligned.
Integrating Instagram with your WordPress site allows you to funnel visitors between the two platforms with ease. Rather than treating them as individual audiences, bridging the gap can help you save time and create more cohesive and consistent content.
3 Tips for Integrating Instagram With Your WordPress Site
Weβve covered some of the reasons why connecting your Instagram and WordPress site is beneficial. Now itβs time to tackle some of the best ways to go about it. Letβs take a look at three tips for integrating Instagram with your WordPress site.
1. Keep Your Branding and Aesthetic Consistent
A common social media mistake businesses make is treating it as a separate entity from, rather than an extension of, their WordPress site. However, keeping your branding consistent across channels offers a handful of benefits.
Carefully curating and maintaining a uniform appearance can:
- Make it easier for your visitors to recognize and remember your brand
- Demonstrate professionalism and credibility
- Increase customer trust
One way to ensure brand consistency is to identify and establish an aesthetic. The key to creating and implementing an aesthetic on Instagram is to have it closely coincide with your website design.
For example, in the images you share on Instagram, you could purposely incorporate your brand colours. You could also use the same (or similar) fonts that are on your WordPress site. Another strategy is to use the same filter on every Instagram post to give it a clean, cohesive look.
It might help to imagine your Instagram profile as a snapshot version of your WordPress site, particularly the header. You could use your logo as the profile picture and your site’s tagline or slogan in the bio. Using a hashtag or emoji in the bio can add also add a distinguishing touch.
2. Cross-Link and Optimize Your Instagram Content With WordPress
When you think of ‘linking’ your site to social media, you may assume it means adding social icons to your website. This is certainly an important part of integrating Instagram and WordPress. It provides an accessible way for visitors to find your Instagram and other social accounts.
However, cross-linking involves optimizing your Instagram in a way that also points users back to your WordPress site (rather than solely away from WordPress to Instagram). Instagram only lets you add one link in bio, so using it for your WordPress site should be a no-brainer.
This isnβt the only way you can use it, though, nor is it necessarily the most strategic. You could also regularly update and rotate the link based on landing pages or special offers youβre promoting.
You can’t add clickable links to your post captions. However, you can carefully craft them so that they serve as a form of a Call To Action (CTA). For example, in addition to using selective hashtags, you can also explain that users can ‘find out more information’ or ‘get started immediately’ by clicking the link in your bio.
Another way to optimize your Instagram for WordPress is to use it to share snippets of your site content. For example, you can use Instagram Stories to tease a blog post to drive engagement to your site.
3. Embed Your Instagram Feed on Your WordPress Site
We mentioned adding social media icons to your WordPress site as a basic and obvious way to integrate your Instagram account with your website. However, you can take it a step further by embedding your Instagram feed on your WordPress site using the Spotlight Instagram Feeds plugin.
Embedding your Instagram feed makes it more noticeable than a simple Instagram logo icon. Your users can actually see your latest (or best) posts, which can help spark interest and encourage them to follow you.
Spotlight makes it easy to display your feed anywhere on your site. Plus, you also have a ton of options for customizing it to fit your aesthetic and branding.
Itβs also incredibly easy to use. When you install and activate the plugin, you simply connect it to your Instagram account and use the live preview customizer to design the feed to your liking, then add it to your website, no coding required.
Using Spotlight to integrate your Instagram with WordPress allows you to:
- Connect multiple Instagram accounts, both personal and business
- Add a feed header with profile details
- Display the posts in a variety of layouts
- Include “Follow” and “Load More” buttons
Spotlight offers both free and premium versions. With the free plugin, you can pull and publish your Instagram feed on your WordPress site as well as style it.
Spotlight’s premium tiers come with more advanced features, such as additional layouts, the option to display likes and comments, as well as the ability to create an Instagram slider.
For page builder lovers, Spotlight works great with Divi and it integrates Instagram feeds elegantly with Elementor, among others.
If you prefer to have each Instagram post be a blog post on your website, there’s a solution for that too. The Intagrate plugin provides a simple way to automatically create and publish posts on your website whenever you share something new on Instagram.
Conclusion
Instagram is an engaging and useful platform that can help you expand your reach and grow your audience. However, it’s particularly helpful if you’re able to cohesively connect it with your WordPress site to funnel visitors and content between the two.
In this post, we discussed three key tips you can use for integrating Instagram with your WordPress site, which are:
- Keep your branding and aesthetic consistent so it’s easier to recognize and remember your business.
- Cross-link and optimize your Instagram content with your WordPress site, which you can do both in your profile bio and post captions.
- Embed your Instagram feed on your WordPress site with our Spotlight plugin, which makes it easier to both streamline your aesthetic and cross-link the channels.
Do you have any questions about integrating your Instagram account with your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments section below!