09 Nov How Instagram Focused WordPress Themes Can Benefit Your Business

Instagram has taken the world of social media by storm ever since it was introduced in 2010. It has already crossed 1 billion active monthly users, a number that most businesses find difficult to ignore. Unique in its concept of offering a completely visual platform for sharing photographs, Instagram is a hit with the smartphone generation who finally have a solution that allowed them to click photos, edit them, and post them to their Instagram account, all on-the-go.

The nature of the social media platform ensured that the followers were young and affluent and thus extremely attractive to businesses that operated in sectors that were more visually presentable such as, fashion and lifestyle, travel, design, food, entertainment, the arts, etc. However, most businesses managed to have their website and Instagram presences independent of each other and found it extremely challenging to convert their Instagram followers to website traffic. The most effective way of converting website visitors to Instagram followers is by displaying your vibrant Instagram photo content on your website to grab the attention of the visitors.

Good Reasons to Use Your Website to Promote Your Instagram Account

A WordPress theme acts to highlight dedicated photo content from your Instagram channel to promote your business and brands. Highlighting dedicated content from the Instagram channel by showcasing them on your WordPress website encourages customer engagement, enhances brand loyalty, gets you more Instagram followers, and increases conversions. Also, by inviting user-generated content, you can build a greater level of customer involvement and that too for free. You can also use Instagram content to give website visitors a peek to behind-the-scenes activities of your business to make them feel special. Instagram content and websites need not be separate islands any more as you can bridge the gap using Instagram-compatible WordPress themes that are a great way of integrating the Instagram feed with your website.

Some great WordPress tips that you can use to integrate Instagram feed:

Re-Post to Instagram

Blog posts are a very good way of sharing your knowledge on any subject with the visitors on your website and it can be quite difficult to manually re-publish them on your Instagram account for the benefit of your followers. However, with the help of a plug-in available for websites built with WordPress, you can automatically schedule your WordPress blog posts for publication on your Instagram account. There are a number of plugins that are available for free that let you do this very easily and without having to know any computer code. Promoting blog posts on Instagram can be a very good way of getting more followers and likes and can supplement your efforts through Instagram marketers. The best way of doing this is to check out whether your theme includes or supports plugins that will allow such functions. It is also possible to supplement the amount of Instagram followers you have gained so far with Instagram services.

A Stunning Photo Gallery

The principal reason why Instagram is such a hot favorite social media channel is that it’s visually oriented and the perfect place for showing off your photo content. While Instagram has its own system of displaying the photos, you will want to want them to be at their attractive best when displayed on your website. The ideal way is to select a theme that builds in a good-looking photo gallery that can display the photos in a clean and uncluttered way that visitors will like. Most themes offer more than one photo gallery option and if you don’t like them or the theme does not offer one, you can easily build stunning photo galleries with a separate plug-in that will do the job splendidly. With an attractive and engaging Instagram-powered photo gallery on your website, you will find that visitors spend more time on the site and are more likely to explore other pages and make transactions.

Instagram Widgets

There is no necessity for you to download or buy a WordPress Instagram plug-in to add Instagram feeds to your business website if you start off with the right theme. Try to look around for themes that already have Instagram widgets built in with which you can move your Instagram content to your website, which is typically in the sidebar or the footer. Unfortunately, not all themes have widgets already built-in so it can save you some time and effort if you take the trouble of finding a theme that comes with widgets.

Clean and Minimalist Layout

While it can be very tempting to choose a WordPress theme that comes with lots of bells and whistles, ideally you should be looking out for a theme that has a very clean interface as it will permit your photos to stand out more. Minimalist themes offer website visitors an opportunity to focus more on the photographs and thereby spend more time on the website. When visitors are encouraged to look at the photographs rather than be distracted by other elements of busy-looking themes, they will automatically feel like becoming your Instagram followers and give more momentum to your Instagram account.

WordPress Plugins

If you already have a theme that works for you and you do not want to invest more in buying a new one, you can still very easily integrate your Instagram account with your website using WordPress Instagram plugins. Using any of the many available for free or the premium ones that you have to pay for, you can get a bunch of facilities like displaying your account feed on the website, filtering by account, hashtag, likes, as well as displaying photographs in a variety of ways like sliders, carousels, collages, and galleries.

Conclusion

With Instagram content being typically very vibrant and captured on-the-fly that act to engage the interest and attention of followers, integrating Instagram content into your website is a smart way of increasing your website traffic, getting leads, and increasing conversions. At the same time, it increases traffic to your Instagram account and as a result, obtain more followers, comments, and likes as well. If you get the selection of the theme and the plug-in right, you can open up a world of possibilities in customer engagement.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Mattei has written many articles on Social Media. He also has experience in the field of web marketing as well as website designing. You can visit his site at gramblast.com and learn how to build more follower presence.