Smash Balloon Social Wall Plugin

What you post on each network was not written for your website

A carousel ending in "link in bio", a giveaway that finished last month, a video made to be watched with a swipe of the thumb. Inside each network, all of that makes sense. Gathered on your home page, next to a customer's review and the news about your new office, it shows that it was made for somewhere else.

That is why a social wall takes more selection work than installation work. Showing five networks on a page is the easy part. The decision that makes it useful is what you leave out, and it is best made before you paste the shortcode.

Social Wall, by Smash Balloon, gathers into one wall the feeds you have already created with its Pro plugin for each network, and adds the filters to decide what gets in.

Five networks on one wall, and what you can adjust

• Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter) and YouTube on a single screen, with an icon on each post showing where it came from.
• Mixable feed types: profiles, hashtags, pages, groups, channels, playlists or searches, depending on what each network offers.
• Three layouts: Masonry, List and Carousel.
• Automatic filters that exclude posts by words or hashtags, or let through only those containing the allowed words.
• Images and cache: it resizes images, can save them on your site and caches the data to reduce requests to each network.
• No iframes, so search engines can crawl the content.
• Block, widget or shortcode to place it, with as many feeds as you like on one page or across the site.

How to decide what goes on your wall

Choose feeds, not accounts. There is no need to pour in the whole profile. An Instagram hashtag of your own, the videos from a YouTube playlist and the photos from a Facebook page can tell one story, for example what your customers do with your product.

Write the exclusion list before publishing. Go through your latest posts and note the words that give away what should not appear on the website: giveaway, contest, bio, the hashtags of past campaigns.

If you post a lot, reverse the filter. With allowed words, only what carries a specific tag reaches the wall. Just add it on the network to whatever you want to show.

Two Pro plugins at least, no posting and automatic filtering

It does not work alone. It is not a stand-alone plugin and needs at least two Smash Balloon Pro plugins installed. It does not create the feeds either: each one is set up first in its own plugin. TikTok requires TikTok Feed Pro by Smash Balloon, which is not the QuadLayers plugin of the same name.

No posting to networks. Its features include no posting or scheduling of content: it displays in WordPress what is already published.

No approval on the wall. Social Wall filters automatically, by words and hashtags. Instagram Feed Pro does have an allow list, where nothing appears until you approve it: check that this selection carries over to the wall before opening it to public hashtags.

From the first feed to the published wall

First install Social Wall alongside two or more Smash Balloon Pro plugins and create in them the feeds you will use. Then:

1. Go to All Feeds and click Add new.
2. Click Add to Wall on each plugin you want to include.
3. Select the feeds and click Create Wall.
4. Adjust the design, click Embed and copy the shortcode.
5. Paste the shortcode into a page, a post or a widget.

The Pro plugins it combines and Flow-Flow as a single plugin

The pieces Social Wall combines are also here: Instagram Feed Pro, Custom Facebook Feed Pro, Custom Twitter Feeds Pro and Feeds for YouTube Pro.

If you would rather use a single plugin, Flow-Flow gathers feeds from 12 social networks plus WordPress and RSS, excludes by word, username or URL, and includes a system for reviewing posts before showing them.

Required plugins, networks, filters and speed

Does it work without other plugins?

No. It needs at least two Smash Balloon Pro plugins installed, because it combines their feeds.

Which networks can it bring together?

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter) and YouTube, each with its own Pro plugin.

Can I hide certain posts?

Yes. They are filtered automatically by words or hashtags, and the wall can also be limited to posts with allowed words.

Does it slow the page down?

It caches the data to reduce requests to each network and resizes images. The final effect depends on how many feeds and posts you show, so it is worth measuring on your site.