Articles on: Socialwidget

What is a Media Source and how to create one in our app

Articles on: Socialwidget

What is Media Source?



Media Source is a place that contains all your Instagram accounts (you can connect two types of account including Personal account and Business account).

After the onboarding, your first Media Source is automatically created since you already connected an account to our app. Simply click on Add new on the right-hand side to connect a new account to our app.



How to add new a Media Source



You can create a media source by connecting an Instagram Personal account or an Instagram Business account.

There is no limit on how many account you can connect to the app. However, you can only create 5 media sources.

A. Instagram Personal Account



After clicking on Add new, choose Instagram Personal and choose the account that you want to connect



You will be redirected to the Setting screen. Within this screen, you can choose to schedule the media sync frequency (the frequency that our app syncs photos/videos/carousels from your Instagram account to the app). You can choose a frequency to match your Instagram update schedule, which results in your feed always stay fresh.


If you want to sync your media manually, simply turn off Auto sync and click Start sync. If you want to get notified by email when the sync is completed, input your email to receive notification from our app.


Your Media Source(s) will appear in the app like this:


B. Business Account



After clicking on Add new, choose Instagram Business and choose the account that you want to connect. You have two choices when setting up an Instagram Business account, which are Profile and Hashtag.


With Profile, you can crawl media from your own account in Choose Profile tab or crawl media from other Business accounts in Custom tab.



If you choose to crawl media from your own account, you can also add other Business accounts to the app by clicking on Add Business account.

If you choose to crawl media from other Business accounts, simply input the account name under Profile name in Custom tab. This feature will be of great use if you want to showcase media from official brands accounts.


Here is an example. You sell clothing, and you also want to feature media from brands such as Zara in your feed. Simply fill the account name "zara", the app will crawl posts from @zara to your media source.

It is normal if you cannot see the video thumbnail. No worry, the video is still synced to the app and it can be displayed on your store. Moreover, you need to click Preview to see how the media is synced to the app.


With Hashtag, you can crawl media that uses a specific hashtag. The media source is updated everyday to crawl the latest media with the hashtag.

For example, you can crawl your own hashtag to increase trust factor for your brand, or crawl hashtags such as #skirt, #dress or #shirt to make your feed more diverse.


Here is how your media source looks like if you use the hashtag #skirt. You can choose between Recent media (the media that is posted most recently) and Top media (the media that receives the most engagement).


Similar to creating a Media Source with Instagram Personal account, you can also schedule the sync process and input your email to be notified.

After creating a Media Source, you can start creating a Gallery to choose which media can be displayed on your store. Please refer to this article for more details.

How to remove items in Media source



As Socialwidget mechanism, all of your images will be immediately synced to the app when being created. Our users can utilize this feature to remove the media items they do not prefer.

Choose Media source

Hover on the images and Tick checkbox

Drop-down Action

Choose Delete


How to sync your Media source



Once there are fresh updated posts on Instagram, your media will need syncing in Media Source. Select Media source tab and Choose below synchronization types:

Auto-sync



Support to sync your media source automatically. There are 3 period times: Weekly, Daily, 6-hour, 2-hour.

Please consider the pricing versions for Auto-sync schedule as Every 06 hours and Every 02 hours.

Start sync



Manually sync your media source once you need to immediately update your feed.



Keep up with total items in Media Source



With Total Items column, you can easily and quickly know how many images and videos have been synced to a media source at a glance.



If you have any further concern, you can always reach out to us via in-app live chat or email at support@socialhead.io

Updated on: 09/01/2024

Updated on: 11/11/2024

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