How to Show Social Feeds on WordPress Community Sites

Are you running a WordPress community site? Do you want to show social media feeds inside member profiles? Join us for this WordPress how-to!

Approximate read-time: 5 minutes

Looking for a way to display social feeds inside member profiles? If you are a community manager running a WordPress site, this is a feature your audience will love.

To get this set up on your website, all you'll need is a WordPress form builder & a social feed plugin. First off, our trusty form builder for this tutorial will be Formidable Forms.

If you are already using Formidable, perfect! You'll just need to add one more plugin: Smash Balloon.

As plugin developers, we take pride in making our own plugin play well with others. Smash Balloon is no exception! It gives users the ability to display social media content on their websites in a variety of ways.

We love this plugin! With Smash Balloon and Formidable Forms combined, user profiles can be taken to the next level with social feeds. This tutorial will teach you how to show a social media feed in member profiles to fit your community website.

? Add a form to a Facebook page

To do this, we'll make use of Formidable Views to display Smash Balloon feeds. Currently, this method works with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds.

Note: In this tutorial, we'll show you how to add Facebook feeds in WordPress, but you'll need to download additional Smash Balloon plugins to work with Twitter feeds and YouTube feeds.

Displaying social feeds on community sites

In just a few easy steps, you'll be able to upgrade your community's member profiles with slick social feeds:

1. Install Formidable Forms & Smash Balloon
2. Setup Smash Balloon & social accounts
3. Create a user directory with fields
4. Add the feed shortcode into the view

1. Install Formidable Forms & Smash Balloon

The first thing is to install the required WordPress plugins. In this case, you need a form builder and a social feed plugin. Here are the links to the core plugins:

• Formidable Forms
• Smash Balloon Facebook Feed

Formidable Forms

You'll need the pro version of Formidable for this to work. The good news is that Formidable Forms Pro is full of form building features that a community website desperately needs.

With easy user registration & simple user registration forms, Formidable can take your community to the next level. Plus, our support team could also help you through this tutorial if you hit a snag!

Smash Balloon

The free version of Smash Balloon is all you need to post social feeds on member profiles. But if you want advanced functions, you'll reach bold new heights with the pro version.

Here's what Smash Balloon Pro can bring to your community's membership profiles:

• Display photos & videos
• Show the number of likes for each post
• Display shares, reactions, & comments for each post
• Choose from multiple layout options

2. Setup Smash Balloon

Once you have those plugins installed & activated, you'll need to connect at least one social account to test everything. This will be your default account.

To do this, go to your WordPress admin and find Facebook Feed → Settings. The process is fairly straightforward, but if you get stuck, take a look at the Smash Balloon setup guide.

3. Create a user directory with fields

Of course, you'll need to have a user directory set up with member profiles for this to work! If you don't have a user directory set up yet, you could check out our post on WordPress User Directories for some ideas.

If you've got a user directory, perfect - let's continue. You will need a few fields for users to input their data into.

Smash Balloon makes this simple. Here's the info you'll need from your users:

• Facebook page name (optional)
• Page ID
• Access Token

If you're still stuck, take a look at our user registration add-on to see if Formidable will work on your WordPress community site. To see how easy it is to get started with Formidable, check our post on creating a form.

? Learn more: The Best WordPress Membership Plugins

4. Add the feed shortcode into the view

Once that's all set up, you'll need to make sure you can display member social feeds in their profiles. This is done with Formidable Views.

Views take form data and display it however you want. Since Smash Balloon works with shortcodes, this is relatively easy to do.

Take a look at the Smash Balloon shortcodes doc to figure out how to best display member social feeds with the options you want.

For example, to display the latest 3 Facebook posts by a user, your shortcode would look like this (where "25" is the Page ID of the user's Facebook page):

[custom-facebook-feed id=[25] num=3]

Wrapping up

Formidable and Smash Balloon are quite the pair once everything is up & running. Your users will love the ability to display their social feeds on their profiles.

And they'll love the seamless process provided by forms from Formidable. For everything WordPress, stick to our Formidable blog. See you there!

Read More from the Formidable Blog

• 18 Easy Ways to Speed Up WordPress Sites
• How to Require Email to Download Files in WordPress
• How to Build a Multi-Step Form in WordPress
• What are the Best ADA Compatible WCAG Forms?
• 13 Powerful Ways to Use WordPress Forms

Formidable Forms is one of the fastest-growing WordPress form builder plugins available today. If you're not already using it, get started with our free plugin or the full-featured premium version! With dozens of features available, it can do much more than community management.