or: How I Learned to Stop Using Embed Codes and Love Embedding Videos, Tweets, and More!
It can be hard to continually write good content for a website or blog. One effective-yet-underutilized type of content is curated social media posts.
You might have seen these on other websites before. They’ll be a series of well-chosen tweets, Facebook posts, and other social content used to tell a story or present different viewpoints on an issue. These can be your posts, other peoples’, or a combination of the two. Done well, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
These “social timelines” are often built with Storify. Storify allows site owners to embed stories on blogs, but here’s a huge secret: in most cases, you don’t need Storify to make a social timeline on your WordPress blog!
WordPress Embeds
WordPress has an amazing feature that lets you embed lots of social media sites directly in the WordPress editor simply by pasting the social post’s URL onto its own line. So if you post this in the WordPress editor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h5mwoTwDBk
You’ll get this:
I’ll wait for you to finish watching 😊…
What Sites Can I Embed with WordPress?
There are a few sites that sadly aren’t embeddable right now like Pinterest and LinkedIn, but most sites you’d want to embed are supported. I bet there are even a few sites you didn’t know you wanted to embed until just now!
- Social
- Facebook*
- Twitter (Including Timelines and Moments)
- Instagram*
- Tumblr
- Video
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Vine
- Audio
- SoundCloud
- Spotify
- Documents
- Slideshare
- Issuu
- Scribd
- And More!
- Kickstarter
- Meetup.com
- WordPress! Yup. Any recent WordPress site should be embeddable!
That’s not even the whole list! Here’s the list of supported “oEmbed Providers” as of September 2020.
Unfortunately, embedding Facebook or Instagram posts now requires using a plugin. Learn more about that change. The easiest solution is to enable the “Shortcode Embeds” module of the Jetpack plugin.
Getting the Right URL
For each site, make sure you get the URL of the specific thing you want to embed. Sometimes that can be a little tricky.
- For Facebook and Twitter, click the time/date of the post to go to the right page.
- In Spotify, you “Copy Song Link” from the song’s menu.
- For WordPress sites, just make sure you’re looking at a “single” page and not the Blog or other multi-post page.
Example of a WordPress Social Media Story
To give an idea of why I think this is so awesome, I thought an example would be useful. Here’s a quick story I threw together about my dog!
I’ve embedded content from my business’s WordPress site, Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram!
In November 2015, I got my first dog! His name is Neko. He’s named after one of my favorite singers, Neko Case. (Yes, our boy dog is named after a woman whose name means “cat” in Japanese!)
Neko Case happens to sing a lot about animals. [Spotify embed]
Neko had a rather unfortunate run in with a dog just after we got him. [Instagram embed]
https://www.instagram.com/p/-mjAa2M7-Q/
It took him a while to get used to the bandages! [Instagram again!]
https://www.instagram.com/p/-0MRvLs7_W/
But he recovered like a champ and is back to walking these days! [Instagram video! (made with the Boomerang app)]
https://www.instagram.com/p/BE6QsUns74t/?taken-by=rootwiley
What Will Your First WordPress Social Story Be?
The possibilities are nearly endless. You could do a roundup of your Tweets from the past month, catalog social media reactions to an event you put on, or just share your favorite cat pictures!
Ask questions or share tips from past successes and failures in the comments!