By chance, do any of you know of or use a social media management tool—think along the lines of Hootsuite—that offers the opportunity to embed the feed directly from the management platform (rather than the social media platform) via widget in your website? Just wondering if this even exists. With social media feeds increasingly hard to embed and audiences for various channels more diffuse than ever, I’m interested in exploring other ways to aggregate content for dedicated audiences.
I’m not sure I can give you the unicorn, but two related notes:
- I know our social media manager uses Buffer for scheduling social media content.
- We use Lightwidget to display the main college Instagram feed on our website.
Otherwise, without full context of your needs, a thought: is it truly necessary to have feeds for all/many social channels on a website? My general philosophy is that social media are platforms for sharing and promoting the content added on your website, not the other way around.
- We believe in education for anyone willing to claim it. See our Financial Aid page to see how you can attend College. (link to page)
- Thanks to College Professor, Student was able to travel in Europe this past summer. Follow their journey in this photo essay. (link to story)
- Want to meet prominent Local Politician and have your voice heard? College is hosting a open forum with the Politician on March 20 at 7 p.m. (link to event)
- etc.
Perhaps there are instances where content is only being shared on social media, and the process of making that content needs to be made to be more web-first? That would get that content on the website in the format that the website works with natively (i.e. stories, show through widgets), potentially minimizing the need for embeds.
Then, for any channels that must have its share of unique content, like Beloit’s student produced Instagram videos, consider the embeds.
Else, one other possibility I can imagine would be to create a “Social Highlight” profile type.
- Fields for Title, Image, Date, Short Summary, Link to Social Post
- Tags for audiences or social channels.
- Add a curated subset of all social-only content as these profiles. (Extra work, but…)
- Allows you to skip over any content already available on your website.
- Gives you full control over the presentation using LiveWhale widgets.
- Gives you ability to filter the variety of content to different needs (i.e. widget filter by tags to get items for alumni)