Displaying your Instagram feed on your WordPress site has a ton of advantages. One of the benefits of showing off your Instagram posts is the fact that you can entice visitors with fresh and updated visual content. Apart from that, you can easily funnel visitors between the two platforms in seconds with a plugin like Spotlight.
However, one of the main concerns that come with displaying your Instagram feed is: what happens when you want to hide or show only specific Instagram posts in WordPress?
Upgrading to Spotlight PRO provides you with 2 ways of curating your Instagram feed through Filtering and Moderation.
Your Instagram feed
In this tutorial, I’ll be taking you through the steps needed to filter and moderate an Instagram feed in WordPress. Before we get to that, however, let’s take a look at my Instagram account.
My feed comprises mostly of nature photography ranging from photos taken in Europe and others in the USA. I’ve also added photography tips in the form of hashtag posts. In fact, as with most Instagram users nowadays, I’ve added multiple hashtags to distinguish between post types:
- #europe
- #USA
- #photographytips
I’ve also included captions on all my posts to give viewers more information about the places I’ve traveled to. Some include words like “landscapes” and “seascapes”. All this information is going to help us filter the Instagram feed in the next few steps.
Note: User-generated content isn’t always everything you expect it to be, so you can also apply the following filtering and moderation features to tagged posts or that with specific hashtags that are uploaded by other people from all over Instagram.
Filtering your feed
First, you will have to connect your Instagram account and design your feed. For a more in-depth guide, you can check out WP Mayor’s tutorial.
At this point, all my posts are showing up on my feed. Let’s head over to the Filter tab to filter the Instagram feed.
Here you have a number of options. You can either filter by the post caption, hashtag, or both.
Caption Filtering
Let’s say I want to create a feed that only displays my landscape posts. All I need to do in this case is go over to Caption Filtering > Only show posts with these words or phrases and write in a word or phrase that forms part of the caption. In this case, I’ve added the word “landscapes”.
Instantly, the feed changes to only show 3 posts.
Of course, you can do the same to hide Instagram posts with those specific words or phrases. Note that you can add as many words or phrases as you like.
Hashtag Filtering
Filtering by hashtag works in very much the same way. In this case, I want to create a feed that only displays photography tips. All you need to do is write “photographytips” in the text field under Hashtag Filtering > Only show posts with this hashtag and press enter.
There you go – all my other posts have disappeared, leaving behind 3 hashtag photos.
You can add as many hashtags as you like. Alternatively, you can hide specific hashtag photos. For example, hiding the posts with #europe and #photographytips will give me all the posts with a USA hashtag. It’s that simple!
Global Filters
An important thing to note is the concept of Global Filtering. This essentially means that a particular filter can be applied across all your feeds.
You can apply multiple caption and hashtag global filters in the same way as described above. To do so, click on “Edit global filters”. You can also access these filters at any time by going to Settings > Global Filters.
This is a handy tool when it comes to displaying posts by various accounts from all over Instagram. One such use case is hashtag campaigns. Brands often create a branded hashtag and ask their clients or followers to take photos of themselves using the product or service and post it to social media.
Brands, in turn, embed these posts on their website as a form of social proof. With Spotlight PRO, you can easily filter out posts to eliminate words such as profanity or rude and derogatory language.
Visual Moderation
Finally, you can also visually moderate your feed by switching over to the Moderate tab. Here you can manually select specific photos you want to show or hide.
In this case, I’m going to select the photography tips posts and hide the Instagram posts from my feed.
Note: You can combine both methods to filter and moderate an Instagram feed.
Filtering and moderating an Instagram feed
Your Instagram feed can be a useful resource on your WordPress website. It can help you drive traffic, increase engagement, and also help you score new clients and followers.
Filtering and moderating it can help you curate your feed and give you full control over what you want to show your visitors. The plugin lets you weed out personal or family photos from your account and display the content that’s relevant to your website.
Additionally, it can also help you create multiple feeds from only one account to be displayed across your website. In this post, we’ve taken a look at how you can do this using Spotlight PRO.
Now that I’ve set up all my feeds, I can easily show off my photography tips in my footer while displaying my USA trip photos in a dedicated post or page.
Filtering and moderating an Instagram feed in WordPress only takes minutes with Spotlight PRO.
Have a go and let us know what you think!
