Bringing in new customers can be a bit tricky. Understandably, most potential clients would be a bit sceptical about trusting a new business. They would first need to find proof that your business is worth trusting and that your product will be worth paying for.
This is where testimonials can be a big factor in your marketing strategy.
Happy customers are essential to any business, and if you already have a whole database of happy clients, you’re in luck! Glowing reviews in the form of testimonials can work wonders for your business.
Testimonials come in many forms. With Instagram gaining popularity among users and businesses alike, it has become a treasure trove for marketers. Instagram is perfect for showcasing a product or service in use with the help of its very unique visual storytelling format.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can create and display Instagram testimonials on your website.
Let’s get to work!
How to display Instagram testimonials on your website
My main aim in this tutorial is to add testimonials to product pages for my furniture boutique website.
I’ve already added some bio text to my Instagram profile, urging clients to upload photos or videos of their purchases in their homes and tag my account or use the dedicated hashtag.
Next, we need to get to work creating and displaying dedicated feeds for all my products.
1. Connect your account
Once you’ve got Spotlight PRO installed and activated on your WordPress website, you need to first connect your Instagram Business account.
Among other features, Business accounts will let you:
- Show posts where your account has been tagged, and
- Show posts with a specific hashtag from all across Instagram.
Both of these are essential to this tutorial.
Once Spotlight is authorized to access your media, your feed will load in a matter of seconds. As I previously mentioned, I’ve already asked my followers to tag my account in their photos or use the dedicated hashtag.
So the first thing we need to do is select the Business account from the “show posts where these accounts are tagged” section and add the dedicated hashtag. You can select between the most recent or most popular hashtag posts.
Instantly, my feed is populated with many of my customers’ images.
This is the perfect example of using user-generated content to boost your social media marketing and make more money.
2. Design your Instagram feed
This testimonial section is going to be placed right below the product information on my product page. I’m therefore interested in having a horizontal section on the desktop and tablet versions of my site.
For this reason, I’ve opted for a Highlight layout with 5 columns, 7 posts, and a highlight every 7 posts. This creates 1 larger image and 6 smaller ones. I’m also going to be adding a heading, urging website visitors to join in on the fun on Instagram. For this reason, I’ve hidden my account header.
Now, for the important part! I really want to spread the message across that my clients love my products. It’s therefore essential to me that like and comment counts are shown on hover, as well as my clients’ captions.
To do this, scroll down to Appearance > Show on hover and select the items you wish to see.
Furthermore, I want the posts to open up in a lightbox with a sidebar where the caption (which acts as our written testimonial) is showing. To enable this, scroll down to Popup box > Show sidebar.
Before we move on to filtering and moderation, there’s one last important step – designing your feed for tablet and mobile. Spotlight is completely responsive, however, it also lets you change your layout for each device.
Select the device icon at the top of the Design tab. The live preview customizer will adapt to the screen size to give you a preview of what your layout will look like.
In my case, having so many columns results in extremely small images on mobile. While the Highlight layout works well on tablets, the mobile layout will need to be changed slightly. I’ve opted for a 3 column Grid layout (similar to Instagram’s app layout) with 3 images.
3. Filter and moderate your Instagram feed
This essential feature is one of the main reasons to upgrade to Spotlight PRO. The premium plugin lets you filter through your feed to weed out any images you don’t want to show your visitors.
In this case, I’ve chosen to hide posts with the hashtag #dogsofinstagram.
Moving on to the Moderate tab, I’m going to scroll through my feed to find those posts featuring one particular sofa. For this, I’ve selected Only show the selected posts and highlighted the ones I like.
4. Embed your feed
All you need to do now is to embed your feed. This can be done using the generated hashtag or the dedicated widget.
I’m using a page builder on my site – Elementor. To add a feed to any section, all you need to do is use the shortcode block and copy and paste the shortcode.
The end result!
There you have it! The feed is now live and completely responsive.
Switching to mobile view, the layout automatically changes to show 3 posts.
Clicking on a post opens up the image in a lightbox with the caption and like count showing in the sidebar.
Conclusion
Testimonials can boost your business’ credibility and the desirability of your brand. More importantly, they can help provide potential clients with social proof.
Showcasing images of your happy clients enjoying your product or service can help bring the message across that your product is totally worth it, resolves a particular problem and addresses a specific need.
These are all important factors to keep in mind when creating your product website. Instagram can be a very good way of creating testimonials. With Spotlight PRO you can now showcase your clients on your website in no time at all.
Have you used Spotlight PRO to showcase your testimonials? Let us know in the comment section below.
