How to Showcase Your Brand with Instagram Testimonials Feed by Flow-Flow
Testimonials are essential for brand marketing and reputation management of any person or company. They build the foundation of trust towards your brand within the potential and existing audience.
Social networks have already become the main source of testimonials for various industries. People are eager to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social channels to post their short review on any product they have bought. It would be wise to use such an unlimited source of UGC (user-generated content) to showcase your brand too.
One of the best ways to get social proof for your product or service is Instagram. This social network has become enormously popular in the last years. More than 850 million people use Instagram every day to share their thoughts, including those related to products and services they buy and use.
Do you want to know how to use Instagram for the sake of your business? We are ready to show you the easiest way to create a custom Instagram feed and get user-generated testimonials for your WordPress website as soon as they appear.
What Is a Custom Instagram Feed?
Custom Instagram feed is a collection of Instagram posts filtered in a certain way to get a particular result. In our case, we want to collect all mentions of your brand because each of them is a part of your brand voice.
Custom Instagram feed can include content from both your accounts (or accounts related to your company) and any other user who mentions your brand by means of a hashtag.
Moreover, the customization of this feed by means of Flow-Flow includes the opportunity to moderate content both automatically and manually. We will describe the opportunities and methods of content moderation further in this post.
How to Create a Custom Instagram Feed?
Actually, it is pretty easy. You only need to follow 3 simple steps:
- Get Flow-Flow Social Stream App for WordPress.
- Add Instagram feed by including accounts and hashtags related to your brand.
- Customize and moderate the collected content.
Let us now describe each of these steps in details for your better understanding of the ease and convenience of the process.
Getting Flow-Flow Social Stream App
There are two versions of Flow-Flow Social Stream App for WordPress websites: free and pro. You can get both of them on the dedicated page of our website.
The main advantage of a free version is obvious, but it has the following limitations compared to a pro version:
- 4 social network sources instead of 14
- only masonry layout for your feeds (slider, wall, and justified designs are available within the pro version)
- limited content filtering opportunities
- no pre-moderation available
- no lightbox galleries
- no search and sorting bars for your feeds
- no database snapshots
- no support
Taking into account these limitations, you would probably need to advance to a pro user of the plugin after trying its free version.
Although you will be able to build a basic Instagram feed with a free version of Flow-Flow Social Stream App, some essential features like pre-moderation and layout options will be unavailable before you upgrade to a pro.
Adding Instagram Feed
After the installation and initial customization of Flow-Flow Social Stream App, you will need to perform the following actions to create your Instagram testimonial feed:
- Find Social Apps menu and visit the Feeds tab to find the button Create Feed.
- Choose Instagram in the pop-up window and proceed to the feed’s customization.
- Set Feed Type option to Hashtag, add the corresponding hashtags to the field Content to Show, set the feed’s update frequency and turn on the moderation option.
- Go to Streams Tab and Create Stream with the corresponding button.
- Give your stream a name and choose a feed you have created earlier.
- Create a new page or post within your WordPress admin panel and add the shortcode of your newly created stream (you can find the shortcode in the stream list).
Customization and Moderation
The opportunities for social stream customization are nearly unlimited within Flow-Flow Social Stream App. Visit the Streams tab and find your newly created stream in the list. You will see the Edit option on the left from its name.
General, Layout and Styling tabs within the stream edit menu provide you with various fine-tune options. The Layout tab is the first thing you need to pay attention to. Feel free to experiment with different layouts to find your perfect design.
The Styling tab includes more in-depth options for stream customization. Here you can pick custom colours for different parts of your feed, choose text alignment, icon styles and shapes etc. There is also a great room for experimentation within your social streams.
The General tab provides you with more specific features like items order, number of initially loaded posts, max image resolution and so on. We recommend sticking to the default settings of this type for the first time.
If you have enabled the pre-moderation features of your feed, then your website visitors will see only the posts you have manually approved for your stream. You need to visit your WordPress website page with a social stream (logged in as an administrator) to have the moderation rights for the posts inside your feed. The moderation is very easy and convenient — you simply approve appropriate posts and ignore inappropriate ones.
Bottom Line
Flow-Flow Social Stream App gives you amazing opportunities to collect user-generated content about your brand and showcase them in a perfect way. You get the full control on both visual and content components of your Instagram testimonial feed with this dedicated social streaming tool.
Grab the opportunity to strengthen your brand voice right now and improve your marketing strategy forever!
