Review: Feed Them Social Makes Adding Social Feeds Easy

Are you a blogger looking to add a feed of your latest Tweets or Facebook posts? Or maybe you produce video content and want an easy way to showcase all your latest creations? No matter what type of social media you’re trying to pull in, Feed Them Social can probably help.

Feed Them Social is a WordPress plugin from SlickRemix that’s all about one thing:

Adding constantly updated social content to your website.

This always-updated content is a great way to keep your visitors updated and get them interacting with your social profiles.

Feed Them Social lets you pull in a variety of feeds from:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• Vine

You can customize how the feeds look, choose where they pull their data from, and add them anywhere with a simple shortcode generator.

So, if you’ve been looking for an easy way to add social feeds to your website, join me as I take you through all the feeds that Feed Them Social offers.

One thing to note – I’m using a test site with all the premium add-ons installed. So don’t expect every single feature I discuss to be available for free!

Add Facebook Feeds to WordPress

With all the extensions installed, Feed Them Social offers a massive 8 different ways of pulling in Facebook feeds:

These are:

• Page: displays posts from a specific Facebook page. You can specify if you want it to include posts from commenters or just the page itself.
• List of Events for a Page: displays all the events from a page.
• Single Events Posts: displays the posts from an individual event. This is great for a landing page for your upcoming events.
• Group: displays posts from a group.
• Album Photos: displays photos from a single album.
• Album Covers: displays album covers for multiple albums.
• Videos: displays your Facebook videos.
• Page Reviews: displays the latest reviews for a page. You can specify the minimum rating required for a review to display in the feed.

Setting up Facebook Feeds

To set up the feed, you just select the option you want and it will automatically give you all the options for that specific type of Facebook feed. For example, if I select a Facebook Page Reviews feed, the options will update to this:

You probably don’t want to showcase one-star reviews on your site, so Feed Them Social lets you specify a minimum rating to display the post. You can easily only display reviews that are 4-stars or better.

I see this type of feed being perfect for adding social proof to eCommerce stores or other types of services.

Another feed type I want to highlight is events. If you have a local business, this feed is perfect for showcasing an always-updated events feed on your site.

For example, if I enter the page of my favorite American Football team, I can quickly get a live feed of all their events like this:

As I mentioned, those are just two of the Facebook feeds I think are especially cool. You have access to six other ones, as well.

Add Twitter Feeds to WordPress

Feed Them Social lets you add two types of Twitter feeds:

• Username: Pulls in the latest tweets from a single username.
• Hashtag: Pulls in the latest tweets from a hashtag. You can also choose to only pull hashtag tweets which were tweeted by a specific user name.

I would be a little leery of adding a general hashtag feed to my site, just because you can never be sure what will pop up on the feed. E.g. if you wanted a feed for conversion rate optimization (#CRO), you would’ve been in trouble during Euro 2016 when the #CRO hashtag was taken over by the Croatian soccer team. That’s not really a knock on Feed Them Social – just the unmoderated nature of social hashtags.

Pulling only hashtag tweets from a specific username is a safer way to do it.

The Twitter username feed is definitely useful, as well. The most common use of this would be to pull in your own Twitter feed, but you could technically use it for any username. E.g. WPLift could add a feed from the official WordPress Twitter account.

When you set up your Twitter feed, you can set:

• Number of posts to display
• Whether you want to include retweets or not (this is a nice feature!)
• A fixed height for the feed

Here’s an example of what the Twitter feed looks like for my Twitter:

I didn’t style it much, but I did test it to make sure it updated after I added new tweets. I set up the feed a day before I took the screenshot and it included all my latest tweets when I went back and checked later.

Add Instagram Feeds to WordPress

Like with Twitter, you have the option to add feeds either by username or hashtag. And again like Twitter, I have the same wariness of using a hashtag feed on my site. The username functionality is great, though.

One cool thing Feed Them Social has done is give you a way to automatically convert your Instagram username into your Instagram numerical ID. This saves you annoying steps that some other apps make you do manually:

When you create your feed shortcode, you have the option of creating a traditional feed or a “Super Gallery”. The traditional feed will scroll vertically (like Twitter), but the gallery is really pretty and looks like this:

*Note – this is also why hashtags are dangerous. The feed is for #hanoi and is all over the place in content.

If you want to display Instagram photos in your sidebar, you should use the traditional feed.

If you want to display Instagram photos in a page or post, the Super Gallery is a really nice feature.

Add YouTube Feeds to WordPress

If you’re a YouTuber, you’re going to love this feed type.

You can add feeds by YouTube users, channels, or playlists.

For example, if I wanted to add the six most recent videos from one of my favorite users, I would pick these settings:

To see something like this:

The Display First Video Full Size setting also allows for some cool designs. If you check that, you’ll get something like this instead:

I think the options here allow you to create some really pretty feeds. If you’re putting out any type of video content, this is a great way to add all your videos to a page on your site.

Add Pinterest Feed to WordPress

Feed Them Social lets you add feeds for:

• Board lists
• Pins from a specific board
• Most recent pins from a user

One odd thing is that, unlike the other feeds, you don’t really get a lot of customization options here. All you get to set is the number of pins to display:

Add Vine Videos to WordPress

I’m not active on Vine, but if you are, this is probably pretty helpful. I imagine this would be great for Vine celebrities or any type of brand utilizing Vine. As far as I can tell, though, it’s not a true feed.

Instead, you have to enter the individual video IDs of the vine videos you want to display:

You can enter multiple video IDs to display something like this:

But it’s still not a true feed. I’m guessing this is due to limitations from Vine, not Feed Them Social, so I’m not trying to criticize. It’s just something you need to be aware of if you’re interested in adding Vines.

You can also customize things like spacing, rounding, and other stylistic aspects of the feed:

Feed Them Social Bar – All Your Feeds in One Place

I think this is one of the coolest premium features of Feed Them Social. If you look at this screenshot, you might think it’s just normal social share buttons:

But actually, when users click on each icon, they’ll see a feed from that network:

You can choose whether you want the bar to display site-wide or only on specific post types:

This is a really nice, minimalist way to display your feeds. The only downside is what I mentioned in the first paragraph – it really does look like social share buttons. So, unless users know about it, they may never even bother clicking because they don’t know what the buttons do.

How Much Does All That Cost?

Ok – remember that I’m reviewing the plugin with all the premium add-ons. You won’t get all this functionality for free.

In the free version of the plugin, you get all the basic feeds except for YouTube. But, you won’t get all the customization options I posted about.

To get all the functionality, you’ll need to purchase some of the four potential add-ons:

• Feed Them Social Premium: Costs $40. Adds lots of customization options, YouTube feeds, and more.
• Facebook Reviews: Costs $40. Adds the cool Facebook review functionality I talked about.
• Facebook Carousels. Costs $15. Lets you showcase Facebook pictures or videos in a carousel.
• FTS Bar. Costs $25. Adds the Feed Them Social Bar.

They also have some bundles which can bring the price down if you need multiple add-ons.

Final Thoughts

Feed Them Social is incredibly comprehensive. If you want to add a social feed, it probably offers the exact one you want.

My favorite feeds were the niche Facebook ones. The Facebook reviews and events feeds give the option to add some really cool functionality to your site. If I had a WooCommerce store, I would definitely showcase all my (hopefully) positive reviews. And if I were a local business, I would add an events feed.

In the end, if you need social feeds, check this one out. If you don’t do any social media, keep on keepin’ on!