Smash Balloon

W ant to easily display social media feeds on your blog? In this Smash Balloon review, we’ll go over its pros and cons to find out if it’s the best social media feeds plugin.

If you have a social media presence and have recently started a blog, embedding social media feeds on your site is a great way to provide extra content to your readers. Plus, it can help you grow your social media following too.

And you don’t need to know anything about coding to embed social media feeds in WordPress; it’s easy with the right tool.

Smash Balloon allows you to display multiple social media feeds in WordPress such as timeline feed, photo feed, video feed, events feed, hashtag feed, etc. Without any restrictions. You can even display feeds from multiple social accounts, facebook groups, etc. This was my first ballon smash pour I attempted. Paints used were Global and colour's were: Black, purple, turqoise, Magenta,Gold, Light pink was made with w. In this guide, we'll go over how to setup and configure the 'Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed' plugin.If you find yourself with any questions at all during the process, please don't hesitate to reach out!

In this Smash Balloon review, we’ll go over the features, performance, pricing, and more, so you can decide if it’s the right social media feeds plugin for you.

In This Guide:

Pros:

Easy to Use
Lots of Customization Options
Display Multiple Feed Types
SEO Friendly
Mobile Responsive
Feed Backup and Smart Caching
Display Likes, Shares, Comments, and Reactions

Smash Balloon Review Summary

Smash Balloon is the best WordPress social feeds plugin on the market with more than 1,300,000+ users worldwide. It’s both easy to use and super powerful. You can quickly embed social media feeds anywhere on your WordPress website without writing any code.

Smash Balloon offers 5 different social feeds plugins to choose from: Instagram Feed Pro, Custom Facebook Feed Pro, Custom Twitter Feeds Pro, Feeds for YouTube Pro, and Social Wall Pro.

All of the feeds are completely customizable. You can choose from over a dozen feed layouts and they automatically adapt to your WordPress theme, font, and style to match your brand.

Get Smash Balloon Today!

Why Embed Social Feeds on Your Blog?

Before we dive into the Smash Balloon review, let’s go over the benefits of displaying social media feeds on your blog.

Grow Your Social Media Following and Engagement

Your blog readers might not know that you’re on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. But by embedding your social media feeds on your blog, you can encourage them to follow you and interact with your posts.

Build Social Proof

To boost your conversions and sales, you need to display social proof on your blog. With Smash Balloon, you can embed an Instagram hashtag feed on your blog to show off user-generated content. When your blog readers see that other people trust you, it will encourage them to become loyal readers, subscribers, and customers as well.

Save Time

Instead of having to manually publish new social content to your blog every time you create a new post, you can save time by embedding your feed directly onto your website. Your embedded social feeds will be automatically updated with the latest content so you can work on more important tasks like driving traffic to your blog.

Boost Your SEO

Embedding social media feeds on your blog can actually help improve your search engine optimization (SEO). With Smash Balloon, Google can read your embedded social media content like it’s a blog post, which can help you rank higher in search results.

Now that you know the benefits of displaying social media feeds on your blog, let’s begin our detailed Smash Balloon review.

5+ Ways to Use Smash Balloon on Your Blog

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Smash Balloon offers 5 different social media feed plugins you can use on your blog and you can use each of these plugins in various ways.

Let’s go over each of them.

Instagram Feed Pro

Instagram Feed Pro lets you display customizable Instagram feeds on your blog easily.

You can display user feeds, hashtag feeds, tagged feeds, Instagram Stories, Instagram TV (IGTV) videos, and more. Or, you can display a mixed feed of different feed types.

You can even display Shoppable feeds on your blog. This lets you link your Instagram posts to custom URLs so visitors can quickly click on a post to buy a product.

Custom Twitter Feeds Pro

With Custom Twitter Feeds Pro, you can seamlessly integrate your Twitter content into your blog.

You can display multiple Twitter feeds from different users, hashtags, or search terms.

You can also display a feed of tweets that mention your account. This is a great way to show real customer testimonials on your site, like in the example below:

The plugin will also automatically create and display Twitter cards and more tweets will load as visitors scroll down your feed.

Custom Facebook Feed Pro

Custom Facebook Feed Pro lets you display posts, photos, videos, albums, events, links, and playlists from your Facebook page.

Here’s a Facebook video feed example:

You can even broadcast Facebook Live videos directly in your feed in real-time, which is an awesome way to boost engagement on your blog.

This plugin also gives you the ability to display posts, events, albums, or videos from a Facebook group.

Feeds for YouTube Pro

Feeds for YouTube Pro lets you display multiple YouTube feeds on your site, either on the same page or throughout your site. You can also combine multiple feeds from different YouTube channels into one single feed.

With the live streaming feature, you can automatically display a feed of upcoming and current live streams from your YouTube channel as well.

Social Wall Pro

Using Social Wall Pro, you can combine feeds from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into a single amazing feed on your blog.

This lets you promote all of your social media channels at once and maximize your content.

As you can see, there are so many ways you can use Smash Balloon social media feeds on your blog.

Next, let’s take a closer look at Smash Balloon’s features.

Smash Balloon Pros

In this section, we’ll go over the pros of Smash Balloon and find out what makes it such an awesome social media feeds plugin.

1. Easy to Use

With Smash Balloon, you don’t need any technical knowledge to embed social media feeds on your site.

The plugin is super easy to set up and use. Basically, all you need to do is click a button to set up your feed.

For example, if you want to embed a Facebook feed on your blog, simply click the Connect a Facebook account button and follow the prompts.

Setting up Smash Balloon is so easy, you can embed a social media feed on your website in less than 30 seconds!

During the setup, you can also easily configure the number of posts you want to display in your feed at one time, when you want the plugin to check for new posts, and more.

2. Endless Customization Options

Smash Balloon social media feeds always look great right out of the box. That’s because they automatically adapt to your WordPress theme, font, and style.

Here’s an example of a standard Instagram feed from Smash Balloon:

But, you can also get creative with your social media feed design. You can easily set the background color, header style, text color, link color, and more, so your feed will match your brand perfectly.

You can also choose from a number of different layouts for your feed.

If you want to embed an Instagram Feed on your blog, you can choose from layouts like:

Grid – Display posts in an organized grid of squares, all the same width and height.
Carousel – Create photo or video carousels to display a lot of content in a small space.
Highlight – Select specific posts to appear larger than others and stand out in the feed.
Masonry – Display photos organically in their intended aspect ratios, instead of fitting them in squares.
And More

Each plugin offers its own layouts you can choose from.

For example, for YouTube feeds, you can use the Gallery layout to create a beautiful look:

With Smash Balloon, you can also choose what to show in your feeds with the visual moderation system. So, if you don’t want specific photos or posts from certain users to show up in your feed, you can easily hide them.

You also have the option of displaying likes, comments, shares, views, etc., on your feeds, which is a great way to show social proof:

And if you want a more minimal look for your feed, you can hide them.

With Smash Balloon, you can completely customize your feed and decide exactly how you want it to look and what to display easily.

3. Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

Smash Balloon is also fully responsive and mobile-optimized. This is important because your visitors may be browsing your blog from a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.

So, you need to make sure your feeds look great on all screen sizes.

Luckily, Smash Balloon has been created with mobile devices in mind so your feeds will always be clear and easy-to-read.

Take a look at it in action:

A responsive and mobile-friendly blog will also help your blog rank higher in search engine results.

Speaking of SEO…

4. Optimized for SEO

As we mentioned earlier, one of the best parts about Smash Balloon is that it can help you skyrocket your search engine rankings.

Google recognizes that your social media platforms are relevant to your brand and they’re often ranked on the first page of search results.

For example, here’s a Google search for the blog WPBeginner:

Notice how WPBeginner’s Twitter profile and YouTube channel are ranked near the top of the first page.

Because social media profiles rank high in search results, you can actually get your website to rank higher by adding relevant social media content to it.

Smash Balloon Instagram Videos

This is what makes Smash Balloon stand out from its competitors.

Unlike other social media feeds plugins, Smash Balloon is 100% optimized for SEO. Smash Balloon uses server-side code in its plugins and it embeds your content directly into your page.

This makes it so the Google bot can read your social media feeds just like it would read your blog posts.

As a result, you have extra dynamic, search engine crawlable content on your site.

Aside from this instant boost to your SEO, by embedding social media content on your site, you can also keep visitors on your site longer.

Google will reward your website with higher search engine rankings when people spend more time on your page.

What better way to keep users on your site longer than by embedding a YouTube feed:

Users can watch your YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook videos right on your website.

5. Super Fast Performance

Worried about WordPress plugins slowing down your site?

That won’t happen because Smash Balloon is built for speed.

Smash Balloon caches the data it receives from social media platforms in order to minimize requests and decrease loading times.

And if you’re embedding a YouTube feed on your blog, you don’t have to worry about too many videos slowing down your site either. Smash Balloon won’t load the YouTube video player on the page until your visitors start interacting with the feed.

With a speedy website, you can improve the user experience for your blog visitors and boost your Google Page Speed score.

It’s also important to note that Smash Balloon has a backup caching system. This feature makes sure that your social media feeds still display on your website even if the social platform is down.

Smash Balloon Cons

We wanted to explore the cons of Smash Balloon, but honestly, we couldn’t really find any.

Smash Balloon is by far the most powerful social media feeds plugin for WordPress.

So, I guess that brings us to the only con…

1. Only for WordPress Sites

Smash Balloon is built for WordPress. So, that means you can’t use the plugin on other blogging platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc.

You also can’t use it if you’ve built an online store with Shopify.

If you’re not currently using WordPress.org for your blog, consider checking out our list of the best blogging platforms to find out why WordPress is the best.

Smash Balloon Pricing & Support

Lastly, let’s take a look at how much Smash Balloon costs and how helpful their support team is.

You can get started with one of Smash Balloon’s plugins for as low as $49 per year for 1 site. If you want to use the plugin on more than 1 site, or want access to more powerful features, you can upgrade your plan.

Smash Balloon also offers an All Access Bundle which will give access to all of the products including Instagram Feed Pro, Custom Twitter Feeds Pro, Feeds for YouTube Pro, Custom Facebook Feed Pro, Social Wall Pro, and all future products for $299 per year.

Smash Balloon provides outstanding support for its customers. If you’re having trouble, you can search the Support Section for helpful documentation. Or, you can fill out the Request Support form on the website and the support team will respond in a timely manner.

Just check out these responses from happy customers:

You can also take a look at the Smash Balloon blog for tons of tips and tutorials that will help you learn how to use the plugins.

Smash Balloon Wordpress Plugin App

Wondering if there are free versions of the Smash Balloon plugins?

If you’re on a budget, you can get lite versions of the plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Repository:

With the free versions, you can easily display social feeds on your site, but you’ll be missing out on some awesome pro features like the ability to combine multiple feeds into one, autoloading content when scrolling, displaying hashtag feeds or mentions, and more.

Verdict: Is Smash Balloon the Best Social Media Feeds Plugin?

At the end of our Smash Balloon review, we can safely say that it’s the best social media feeds plugin on the market.

Smash Balloon is super easy to use, you can embed a social media feed on your blog in less than 30 seconds! Plus, with the endless customization options, powerful social media marketing features, SEO features, and super-fast performance, it stands far ahead of other plugins in this space.

We hope you enjoyed this Smash Balloon review. If you’re looking for more plugins to grow your blog, check out our SeedProd review to find out if it’s the best landing page builder.

And don’t forget to sign up to our email newsletter so you can get useful content like this sent right to your inbox!

In this guide, we'll go over how to setup and configure the 'Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed' plugin.

If you find yourself with any questions at all during the process, please don't hesitate to reach out! We're happy to help.

STEP 1: INSTALLING & CONFIGURING THE PLUGIN

1. First, install the 'Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed' plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/instagram-feed/).

2. Navigate to WP Dashboard > Instagram Feed.

3. Click on the big blue 'Connect an Instagram Account' button. This will connect with whatever Instagram account you are currently logged into.

STEP 2: SETTING UP THE WIDGETS

A ) TO INSERT 3x3 INSTAGRAM GRID INTO WIDGET AREA

Smash Balloon Social Post Feed

1. Navigate to WP Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets.

2. Drag a standard 'Custom HTML' widget into your Sidebar or Footer widget area where you want the grid to appear.

3. Copy & paste in this shortcode:

Save changes.

1. Navigate to WP Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets.

2. Drag a standard 'Custom HTML' widget into your 'Instagram Footer' widget area.

3. Copy & paste in the following shortcode:

In the above shortcode, do you see the 'num=9' and the 'cols=9' bits? This determines how many total images will show and in how many columns they'll show.

If you want a row of 11, for example, set it to be 'num=11' and 'cols=11'. This will show 11 images in 11 columns (11 images in a single row).

STEP 3: ADDING THE STYLING CODE

Lastly, we'll need to add some CSS styling code to ensure the feed spans 100% width of your site.

Navigate to WP Dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Custom CSS/Additional CSS box > and add the code below related to your particular Solo Pine theme:

// HAWTHORN:

We have added the custom stylings to Hawthorn's latest theme update, version 1.3.1. (https://themeforest.net/item/hawthorn-a-wordpress-blog-shop-theme/21361268).