What is embedding?
Embedding is basically when links and other sorts of digital media like videos, pictures, and gifs are merged on various posts on social media. This content is a part of a social media post and is a visual representation of an emotion or excitement and helps people to communicate more and is quite effective in increasing engagement as well.
The benefits of embedding:
One of the popular ways to increase engagement and activity on social media is by the means of embedding. This is just not limited to articles or videos or just images and gifs. Embedded content is used in various posts. First of all, videos are quite an effective way of communicating and engaging with the audience. Let’s just say you are a donut supplier and are opening a new outlet in the ABC area. Every day you could post embedded content such as videos or gifs and even images that could focus on your food product or maybe a countdown in gifs. What does this do? This helps create an aura of excitement and helps your business and social media posts stand out.
Instead of posting paragraphs talking about it, a fun video does the task of communicating the message to the viewers. Wordy posts are sometimes avoided by many people especially the young generation, they prefer cool content and view and share it more than they would share a wordy post.
What is WordPress and how does one make use of it:
WordPress is a way one can create their own personal website or blog. This blog or website could be dedicated to anything of choice. Research says it is most likely that one out of four websites is powered by WordPress. WordPress helps you create a website that could revolve around a business or even e-commerce stores. It can even help you create portfolios, blogs, and resumes. Basically, anything that you want to create on a website can be done through WordPress.
WordPress embed :
WordPress is pretty user-friendly and allows you to easily embed videos on your blog posts. You can embed videos from various video hosting sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and various others too.
These videos are a chance to increase engagement on your WordPress and bring a lot of traffic to your site. But recently two video hosting sites: Instagram and Facebook discontinued their embedded feature meaning you can’t just automatically use up their content a certain process has to be carried for this to happen.
Why did this occur?
Now when you have a platform used by various numbers of people and all that matters for you to have traffic so the content can be appreciated and loved by many. Now imagine someone taking away all that traffic from you meanwhile using your content and displaying it. You’re getting the appreciating but not straight up at your own site. People are talking about the videos or images and gifs but they’re just forwarding the link while the traffic decreases on your site.
Now picture this: Facebook and Instagram knowing what was happening with them. Their pages had the content but there wasn’t traffic at least not as much as they were expecting. So on October 24th, Facebook announced that there will be a process that needs to be carried out by any WordPress site or user for anyone to embed videos or any other digital media.
What can be done now?
To continue things like they were before you can put in a little bit of effort and cross the below-stated methods to get yourself through.
– make a developer account on Facebook. This can be created at developers.facebook.com
– Secondly, you have to register your app
– What they want you to do is add an Embedded product to that app. In Facebook oEmbed you are only given the liberty to embeds HTML and metadata for various pages, posts, videos, and images in order to have access to them on some other website or app.
– The fourth step is that an app access token is required. These app access tokens should be kept securely and stored on the server. App access tokens as well client access tokens are used to get access to your media such as videos, posts, and images. Both of them can be used. App access tokens can take up to 5 million requests per day whereas client access token is preferred when the agent accesses from mobile phones or web browsers both.
Now, this process is quite a lengthy one and can turn out to be good for you or maybe not. It’s not a viable option for quite a few people. So what can you do now to get the embeds working as they did previously, well here you go:
- You could either use the method that Facebook has made default now. It’s complicated and messy and will put you off.
- You can get access to WordPress plug-ins such as the oEmbed Plus that replaces embedding for both Instagram as well as Facebook content. Although this may be an easier process it still has an important requirement; you have to go through the process of registering your app with Facebook which will give your developer account and hence create an App ID for you.
- Another plug-in that may work for you and be a little hassle-free is Smash Balloon’s updated plug-ins made just for Facebook and Instagram. These plug-ins not only eradicate the issue at hand regarding the embeds but lets you keep your existing content. Not only this but these plug-ins have free versions that work quite well and Pro versions too that you need to pay for to get access to quite a few useful features to make your experience better.
- Another simpler way is to get access to Jetpack which requires you to connect your site to Jetpack. The development team worked with Facebook to make it simple for you.
So now it is up to you on how you want to make it work for your app. Whether you prefer the long way in or a simpler way.