Have you ever had a nightmare where your company website doesn’t have exciting content published recently, and you feel there are never enough resources for content creation?
Don’t worry; you’re not alone.
According to Convince & Convert, 27% of marketers find it challenging to produce enough content.
A social media wall embedded on your website can help you to solve that challenge.
What is a social media wall?
A social media wall gathers content from various social media feeds in one place and is displayed on a company's websites, mobile apps, digital screens, and any other digital service. Fresh (and usually automatically updating) content on your website will make your service feel vibrant - and will also help you to show that you’re an expert in a specific area.
Most companies today have active social media channels and you can create a social wall in a few minutes by gathering your own content. A lot of sweat and tears go into the production of social media content, so why wouldn’t you reuse those posts on your site?
You might think that setting up a social media wall requires active social media accounts from your organisation and that’s stopping your from getting started.
You don’t necessarily need any of your own content to set up a social wall.
Do you collaborate with other companies or participate in industry events? Do news sites, your employees, or customers actively mention your brand or a branded hashtag?
A social media aggregator will help you to curate and display public social media content created by your fans and stakeholders - and most likely there’s a stream of valuable posts waiting for you.
For inspiration, learn more about the social media wall by New Zealand’s national cricket team mixing posts from the team, players, trusted news sources and fans.
The key benefits of a social media wall
When people ask me what I do for work, they often wonder why organisations, from SMEs to global brands, would display social media feeds on their websites. What’s the point?
The size and industry plays a significant role in details but the key benefits of a social wall are:
- Grow the number of followers of social media accounts
- Build engagement and organic reach on social media
- Increase time spent on site (and improve SEO)
- Drive conversions with social proof
1. Grow the number of followers on social media
Most marketers say that one of their social media goals is to grow the number of followers on social media channels. Displaying inspiring content from your social media channels on all digital services will drive traffic to your social media accounts and increase the number of followers and fans.
Traffic to your sites comes from multiple sources - and only a fraction of your website visitors are followers of your social media account (let alone all of your channels!). A social wall is an excellent way to show all of your content in one place and inspire your audience to follow your future updates.
2. Build engagement and organic reach on social media
Do you know how social media channels prioritise the content that is shown to each user?
Our friends and other people we follow in social channels post so much content every day that it’s impossible for us to see all the latest content from everyone. Therefore, social media channels prioritise the posts that have the most engagement within our network. In other words, channels start with the posts that have the most shares, likes, reactions and comments by the people we know and add some of the latest posts (and the most relevant ads) to the mix based on our interests and past behaviour.
Displaying social media content on your digital services will inspire your audience to share those posts with friends and that will increase your visibility and reach in social media channels. Also, the content will drive traffic to your social media accounts and inspire visitors to like and comment some of your posts.
In short: the more people interact with your posts, the more people will see them in their feeds.
3. Increase time spent on site (and improve SEO)
As well as increasing engagement and reach on social channels, a social wall will improve your site metrics too!
Inspiring and fresh content will help you to keep your site visitors engaged longer and spend more time on your site - and that will drive traffic to your product pages and call-to-actions. The longer time spent on site can improve your SEO and Google search rankings too.
GoPro’s Instagram wall is an excellent example of how brands can increase time spent on site by adding a social media feed on their website. An inspirational Instagram feed display the best entries to GoPro Awards, and this drives traffic to product pages.
4. Drive conversions with social proof
If you go back 10-15 years, you probably asked your colleagues and friends offline if they had any product recommendations when you were looking for something. You might still do that, but these days we more often turn to social media channels and ask our network - or search the latest posts and hashtags to find other customers using what we're looking for.
What would be a better way to learn more about a holiday destination than typing a hashtag to Instagram?
We’ve always trusted our friends and other customers’ feedback more than the shiny images or brochures by brands - and the same applies to social channels. Asking your customers to share feedback with a branded hashtag or mentioning your account is an excellent way to gather some authentic content to your social wall.
Most people like to share their positive experiences online - and promoting your branded hashtag on the website, email marketing, social media channels and in physical spaces will encourage your customers to give feedback on social channels. Displaying those authentic experiences on your website will increase conversion rates.
For inspiration, check how Hapag-Lloyd Cruises has created a stunning Instagram grid showing social proof from happy customers.
How do you add a social media wall to your website?
Creating your social media wall is fast and easy - here’s how to get started:
1. Set up feeds from various social media channels
With Flockler, you can set up your own rules on what type of content you’d like to display on your website. Instead of selecting each piece of content one-by-one, most Flockler users set up automated feeds from various channels and create a mix of content. Instagram and Facebook are the most popular channels, and the list of supported social media feeds breaks down the channels and content types that are available at the moment.
Setting up an automated feed to gather posts by hashtag, posts mentioning a particular username or posts published by a specific social media account takes less than a minute.
When creating an automated feed, you can decide if the posts are displayed on your site automatically or if they are stored to moderation.
Even if you decide to display posts automatically, you can always hide each post from the social wall later.
2. Embed a social wall on websites, mobile apps or any digital service
After creating an automated feed, navigate to the ‘Display’ tab on Flockler, copy the code and ask your developer to paste it to any website, mobile app or digital service. By default, the embed code will create a sleek and responsive wall layout but you can choose from multiple layout options and customize the look and feel precisely with the help of the Flockler team or with your favourite developer.
Here’s an example of how a social wall looks on the website:
You can create multiple social media walls and display them on an unlimited sites, pages, and services. The pricing is based on the number of automated feeds that you create - and there’s no limit on the number of pages the content is displayed or how many walls you’ve created. The more value you get for the price, the happier we are!
If you are gathering images videos, you might prefer the grid layout that resembles the Instagram profile page. Here’s an example from the Opus Art Supplies:
If you don't have much space, e.g., on your homepage, you might consider displaying a carousel of your latests posts. Here's an example by Philips:
In addition to websites, many companies have digital screens to display the content at the office, in public spaces and in events. A social media wall layout is a great option for digital displays too but a slideshow format rotating the latest posts is often more suitable and engaging for visitors.
Here’s an example of a slideshow format with FIFA Museum in Zürich:
