According to data from Builtwith, over 7 million websites are built with Wix. Is yours one of them? If so, you might be wondering how to connect this popular website builder with another hot platform: Instagram.
As one of the top social media platforms in the world, Instagram is a treasure trove of content. Whether you want to add your own Instagram content to your Wix website, or aggregate content from other Instagram users, you can do that easily.
In this tutorial we show you exactly how.
Step 1. Choose a social media aggregator
First, you need to choose a social media aggregator tool, which will pull posts from Instagram into a feed that you can embed on your Wix website. Without this type of software on your side, you'll have to individually embed every Instagram post that you want to include on your website. But when you use such a tool, you only have to copy the embed code for the feed once, then any changes you make (such as approving or denying a post) will automatically be reflected on your website.
Fortunately, social media aggregators are easy to use and are free for most small websites. For larger companies with more complex needs, there are affordable options.
Step 2. Select Instagram as the content source
The next step is to login to your aggregator software and select Instagram as the content source. If you want to, you can later add posts from other social media networks to the same feed.
Step 3. Choose the account or hashtag to pull content from
With Instagram, there are several different options for the type of content you can aggregate.
You can pull Instagram posts and add them to your Wix website using these methods:
- Connecting an Instagram business account (feed posts)
- Connecting an Instagram business account's IGTV posts
- Connecting an Instagram business hashtag (or any hashtag you want to pull content from)
- Instagram business mention (whenever followers and fans tag you)
- Instagram private account (has to be your account)
- Instagram stories (the stories from your account)
After your select Instagram, you'll be prompted to choose from the following list:
Of course, there is some strategy that goes into this decision. If you want to showcase your own content, then choose one of the methods that pulls from your own account. If you want to share user generated content, then you can choose mentions or a hashtag -- just be sure to follow the next step so you only add quality, safe content to your website!
Here's an example of a company that features customers' Instagram posts on their website:
Step 4. Curate the Instagram posts (approve and deny)
Next it's time to approve or deny posts, based on the curation style you choose in the settings. If you choose that all posts will be automatically approved, then you should delete ones you don't want on your Wix website. If you choose that all posts should require manual approval, then you should approve the wants you want to show up.
Step 5. Stylize the feed
Now it's time to choose your feed style. You can include all of the post caption with Waterfall, or keep things simple with the Grid style. There are lots of different templates to choose from. If you want, you can also add your own brand colors for the captions and Instagram logo.
Step 6. Add the Instagram feed to your Wix website
When you're finished choosing all of the Instagram content you want to add to your Wix site and stylizing the Instagram feed, the final step is to simply copy and paste the embed code. Wherever you paste it in your site, it'll appear exactly as it looks when you're stylizing it.
Just hit "Publish feed" and a pop-up will appear showing the code you need to copy to your clipboard. Then paste this in your website footer, blog side-bar, or wherever you want the Instagram posts to show up.
That's it! Your Instagram feed is now live on your Wix site.
The next step is just for maintenance.
Step 7. Continue to curate the posts as needed
Depending on the content you're aggregating you might not need to do much maintenance at all. If you're curating your own posts and you're selective about what you post on Instagram, you can use the automatic approval feature of your social media aggregator to allow the new posts to automatically synch to your website.
If you're posting content from other users (via mentions or hashtags), then you should login to your social media aggregator tool every so often to approve new content so it's added to your website.
Easy. With these steps your Wix website will always be fresh.