Blogpost was published on October 19, 2022
In the last decade, social platforms have increasingly become routine in our daily lives. Most people, on a personal level, scroll through and update their social media accounts for several hours each week. Social media has even become almost crucial to a business’s success as we lean into digital marketing more each day.
For most businesses, social media has become a thing they can not avoid. Unfortunately, maintaining a social media presence for your company requires a daunting amount of time and energy even if you only focus on one platform.
Since you are putting in the effort to keep up with your social media presence, it only makes sense to promote and display it on your digital signage screens. With Play Digital Signage, effortlessly integrate your social media platforms within your digital signage content utilizing Photo Frame and our wildly popular social media plugins.
When you hear “photo frame” you may think of the electronic picture frames that have a slideshow of your family photos. Though that’s not what we are talking about here, it is actually quite similar.
The photo frame feature with Play Digital Signage enables you to neatly organize a collection of photos that rotate on a set time frame within your digital signage slides. In addition to being able to set the rotation schedule, there are plenty of other helpful customization options which we will dive into later in the article.
There are a few choices when it comes to sourcing the photos to use with the photo frame feature, but today, we are going to focus on integrating the photos you’ve posted to social media. We’ll also go over our other social media plugins that can display posts and other social media content on your digital signage screens.
The Facebook Photo and Instagram Photo plugins are the two designed to be used with the photo frame feature; however, Play Digital Signage has several other social media plugins available as well.
Keep reading to get an overview of both the Facebook and Instagram Photo plugins in addition to the Instagram Hashtag, Facebook Posts, and Twitter integrations, which are the most widely used.
Facebook Photo connects your digital signage to your business’s Facebook page to bring photos posted to Facebook into a photo frame on your chosen slide.
The plugin can find and use photos from your Facebook page on its own or you can specifically choose the photos from your Facebook albums. This means you can create various albums specifically for different topics like digital signage entertainment, sales, campaigns, etc., and choose which of those you display and where in your digital signage content.
The best feature of Facebook Photo is that when you upload a new photo to an album connected to your digital signage, whether from your phone or computer, you’ll see them on your TV(s) within a few minutes.
Suggestive of its name, the Facebook Posts plugin differs from the Facebook Photo plugin by adding your Facebook posts to your digital signage rather than just photos. By connecting your Facebook page’s feed to your digital signage screen, you’ll end up with a live look at your company’s posts on your screens as it updates every time you post something new.
Instagram Photo works similarly to the Facebook Photo plugin. It connects your digital signage to your company's Instagram profile integrating the photos on your profile into your digital signage content.
Though there is not really a choice of albums like with Facebook Photo, there are ways to filter which photos it brings over. Like the others, if you upload a photo that meets the settings you have set in the plugin, it’ll automatically display on your screen within minutes.
Instagram # (Instagram Hashtag) is a bit different than the Instagram Photo plugin, though you’ll have the same options and tools in both.
For the Instagram Hashtag plugin, rather than the photos from your feed, the photos it uses will be based on up to 5 hashtags that you choose. For instance, entering “#fashion” will draw photos that have been uploaded with “#fashion” in the caption.
This is a great way to get continually updating social media content that you don’t have to create yourself.
The Twitter plugin relies on the same concept of connecting Twitter to your digital signage. However, it has the ability to display both the feed of a particular profile or posts with a designated hashtag. So, you can either display your own company’s Twitter feed, another relevant profile, or a continuous stream of posts with a related hashtag.
You will find that the setup and customization opportunities are similar amongst all of the social media plugins, though they do have small differences.
As we mentioned earlier, Instagram Photo and Instagram Hashtags more or less have the same customization. However, two differences include being able to enable “Some Time Ago” on Instagram Photo which shows how long the photo was posted, and the ability to choose whether you want the top photos or most recent photos for your chosen hashtags in Instagram Hashtag.
The Facebook Photo and Facebook Posts plugins differ in their customization options. Facebook Photo only has the Photo Frame features including choosing borders or lack thereof, the number of columns, and the update interval for how quickly it flips through the photos. With the Facebook Posts plugin, you can choose a custom background, the threshold for when it shows how many “likes” each post has, the font zoom, and the post layout.
The customization options for the Twitter plugin include choosing the font color, size, and design, text alignment, update interval, the Tweet count (similar to the “Like” Threshold with Facebook Posts), enabling when the Tweet was posted, and whether you want to show the number of “retweets” and “likes”.
To set up all of these social media plugins, you’ll follow the same general steps. First, log in to your Play Digital Signage content editor and either create a new playlist or navigate to the slide you want to put the content on.
Once you have where you want it pulled up, click the button labeled “Social” on the top toolbar. It will display a list of the social media plugins, so select the one you want to use.
After selecting a choice, it will populate a box on your slide that you can adjust which will be the size of the live feed or photo frame. Using the toolbar on the right side, you’ll connect your account and make your customization selections.
It is a rather simple process, though we have included the help guide links for each of the social media plugins just below.
Of course, if you have a problem after consulting the help guides, our 24/7 live chat experts can work through any issues with you. Find the chat icon in the bottom right corner of any page on the Play Digital Signage website.
Both the social media plugins using photo frames and those bringing in other types of content are highly valuable when creating your dynamic digital signage content.
We highlighted automatic updates on a few of the plugins, though all of the social media plugins have automated updating functionality. Once you’ve initially set up the plugins in your digital signage content they will automatically update on the fly and show your viewers the latest content from your social media.
For example, if you upload photos to your Instagram frequently during the day the plugins will automatically see that, download them, and display them on your TV(s).
The more people who see your social media, the more people who are likely to join your community and follow along. Therefore, why not display your social media for your digital signage audience to see?
This is especially effective if your digital signage is in a high foot traffic area, though it is still worth it no matter the size of your signage audience.
The main objective of our social media photo frames and post plugins is to avoid you having to add existing content or create new content in multiple places.
The way that we do this is by linking your digital signage content with your social media platform, in this case, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Simply keep up with the social media accounts and you’ll have gorgeous digital signage content at the same time.
There’s no need to take the time to add it to your digital signage after you do the work to post on your platforms. You also don’t have to spend a bunch of time creating and uploading separate digital signage content.
Above we went over some of the great customization options available with these plugins. These allow you to adjust various things so that they blend nicely with your other content elements and overall branding design.
Keeping the visuals of your company consistent aids in consumer recognition and engagement, making the availability of customization quite important.
There are a ton of ways you can use these awesome plugins, you can add them to existing slides, new slides, add both Facebook and Instagram on the same slide, and more. How you use it is up to you!
The ultimate outcome here is that you can catch the viewer’s eye with gorgeous content that you already spent hours creating for your social media platforms. It’s the best way to get dynamic digital signage content while using your time wisely.
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