In this episode of Tech Tuesday, we demonstrate how you can add a social media widget to your homepage—or any other custom page on your website—that features posts from your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts.

Video Transcription

Harley:

Welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday, presented by Delta Media Group, where we feel that the finest retelling of any Charles Dickens Classic is done by Jim Henson. So today we are going to take a look at the social media widget. What this widget does is it allows you to basically place a widget on any custom page you'd like, including your website homepage, that will display the posts that go on to, or that you create, actually, that you make on the social account of your choice. So it doesn't support every social media account type. At this point it supports Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So you can put a widget that will show your posts for any of those right on whatever custom page you choose. So let's go in and take a look at how you can go in and add them.

Harley:

So first we are going to go up here, click on our name, and then click on profile to go to our agent profile page. And the first thing we'll do is take a look at our social media section, if I can type it correctly. There we go. So I could just scroll down and find my way there, but the easiest way is just type social up here at the top, and you can see it filters down to just the social networking URL section. And now here I want to enter the URLs for any of my social accounts. So as I mentioned, for this feature, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the only ones that actually matter. So, you can see that in this case I have Facebook and Twitter entered. To do an Instagram one, you do have to have a Instagram business page set up, and if you do, you would put in the URL of that page here. But for the sake of the demonstration, I have these two and that'll be enough that we can see what this looks like.

Harley:

So, once you have your social media URLs entered, you want to click update social URLs to make sure that those save, and then, you can go ahead and you can add this widget to whatever page you'd like. So since we're already on the profile page, I'm just going to take out social here, and I'm going to change that to bio, and you can see that filters here to our paragraph about you or our homepage bio section, and we can just add the widgets right in here. Now again, you can add these to any custom page you'd like. So you could just go over here to website, and then down to pages, and from there you could create a custom page that features these social widgets as well. But in this case, we'll just put them on the homepage so you can get an idea what they look like.

Harley:

So I'm going to clear all that extra content out there. And then to add in my social widget, I am just going to click on my custom short codes button here, and we're going to go down to social media widget. Now you can see when you select it, it brings up this modal here where we can select what kind of social media widget we'd like to add. So we'll select our dropdown, and I would like to add a Facebook widget. There you go. And now you can see there is a little message here that tells you if those URLs are not available, it's because they haven't been entered to your social networking page. And that's what we just did. So we went to the profile page here, went to the social section, and that's where my Facebook and my Twitter URLs were already in. So if those don't show up, that's what you need to do.

Harley:

Now next, we can select our widget style. So we'll go ahead and make this one standard, and just click insert widget, and you can see there's my short code, and then when this page actually loads up publicly, that will be rendered out as that social media widget. Now just to cover our bases, we'll add in the second one too. So I'll go back up here. Social media widget. This time we'll do Twitter, and we'll make it an advanced widget. And you can see we've got some more options here, so we're going to make it dark so you can see what that one looks like, and I can control this size if I'd like. I'll just make it what the defaults are. But really you can make this whatever you'd like. If you'd like it to take up more or less space on your homepage. And insert that widget as well. And you can see a very similar short code, but this one's pointed at Twitter and there's some more specifications attached to it.

Harley:

So now that that's done, I'm going to update that paragraph. There we go. And now, I will preview my website. Now what you'll notice is I'm looking at my homepage here, on this particular template. The homepage bio paragraph just shows up right here, but it's just that first snippet of it. So if I click read more, that'll take me to my complete homepage content, and that's where I can see my widgets load up. And you can see. So Facebook, my Facebook business page widget, it's just loading all of my posts up right here in a nice convenient widget. We scroll down a bit further and here is my Twitter one. Now in the case of Twitter, these aren't my posts. These are posts for whatever page I put in there, I think.

Harley:

So that's how it loads up. Now, this would be a different size if I had chosen different size perimeters. Instead, I just made it what the defaults are, which makes it match the other box. But I could customize those sizes. I could also make it load up with different positioning if I choose, because it just renders wherever that short code is in Like Page Content. So the one other thing I'll mention here is that you can see all the homepage bio content loads in a widget. That is just, or loads in a modal rather, but that is just a function of this particular website theme. Most websites, there will be a content section right here on the homepage, and that's where that content section will show. So there you have it. That is how you can use the social media widget. And again, you can also use this on any custom page you'd like.

Harley:

So you could even create a purpose-built social media widget pages. Just sky's the limit. Whatever makes sense. So as always, thanks a lot for joining me. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call. We can walk you through this functionality or anything else you'd like. Also, this will be our last Tech Tuesday for 2022. So, we are going on hiatus for a little while to make sure that all of our training materials, courses, Delta Net Academy courses, just making sure everything is aligned and all set up for our Delta Net 7 release early next year. So, have a wonderful year and a wonderful holiday. We'll look forward to meeting again when Tech Tuesday returns on January 31st, 2023. Thanks a lot.