Latest news from 5wire Networks

If your goal is to drive more traffic to your blog or e-commerce site through Instagram, then publishing content from your website to the platform can be a way to do this. 

You don’t need to manually go about it. As with just about anything else you’d want to achieve with WordPress, there’s a plugin to simplify the process and save you time and energy.

Automated publishing to Instagram from WordPress

While there are several dedicated plugins that focus on publishing to individual social media platforms, one stands out for its cross-platform publishing capability. 

Uncanny Automator not only offers free built-in support for leading socials but also integration with productivity apps such as Google Sheets and ActiveCampaign.

That way, regardless of your budget and even if you’re just starting out, you can access the core publishing functionality at no cost.

Step 1: Install the Uncanny Automator WordPress to Instagram feed plugin

Simply head over to your WordPress dashboard, hover over ‘Plugins’ and click ‘Add New’. Use the search bar and look up the plugin. Click ‘Install’ then ‘Activate’.

Step 2: Connect your WordPress website to Uncanny Automator

Once activated, the plugin will create a dedicated tab in the dashboard. Click on ’Automator’ to open the settings, then under General, click on ‘connect your site’. Based on the prompt, choose whether you want to proceed with a free account or upgrade to the pro version. If you opt for the free version, follow the on-screen prompt to create an account. 

Step 3: Link your Instagram account

For this step, the Instagram account you want to connect to the plugin needs to be a Business Account connected to a page on Facebook.

Under the Automator tab, go to settings and select ‘Premium integrations’. From the list, select Instagram and connect the Facebook page tied to the Instagram account. Allow Uncanny Automator permission to access the Instagram profile and posts as well as to create new posts.

Once done, you’ll see the account under ‘Linked accounts’ in the plugin dashboard on WordPress.

Step 4: Automate publishing from WordPress to Instagram feed

In Uncanny Automator, automation for automatic publishing is called a recipe. To create one, click on ‘Automator’ then ‘Add New’. Next, choose whether only users logged into WordPress can trigger the automation and click ‘Confirm’. Name the recipe as desired. The next thing to do is define how/when the recipe will be triggered. In the Triggers section, click on the WordPress icon. Use the search field to look up this query, ‘A user publishes a type of post with a taxonomy term in a taxonomy‘. Once you do this, you’ll have some fields to fill. Under ‘Post type’ select ‘post’. The ‘Taxonomy’ field will enable you to filter the blog posts you want to be shared to Instagram based on the tags or categories used on the posts. After you’ve configured the recipe, save your changes. Under ‘Action’ click the ‘Add Action’ button. Click on Instagram, then select the Publish a photo to an Instagram Business account’ option. You then have the option to choose whether to publish the same image for each blog post or use a different one each time, such as each post’s featured image.

Now, sharing your blog content to Instagram should be more manageable.