Flow-Flow: Social Streams Plugin Review

Let’s face it, sometimes it can be a mess trying to centralize all your social feeds in one place. I have enough problems keeping track of my growing list of email and user accounts. That’s why I’m always glad to find apps that help me organize my workflow. Flow-Flow: Social Streams does just that. It lets you collect and display social media content from your favorite social network. This premium WordPress plugin makes it easy to build an incredibly powerful social hub. Flow-Flow has the capability to handle multiple feeds and multiple users in a single network. Mix and match any combination of social feeds you’d like. The possibilities are unlimited.

For instance, you could have 5 different twitter feeds and 4 Google+ feeds in a single stream. Flow-Flow displays social feeds in a beautiful responsive grid, that is easy to customize and simple to install. Filter add and remove streams easily inside the editor. There are many web services that charge recurring fees for similar functionality. Create an awesome social media hub on your site without the monthly fees. Link any RSS to your website and expand your audience. Flow-Flow is a money saver and a money maker.

You can use this premium WordPress plugin to moderate your social feeds by URL, username, or by keywords. I found it more convenient than other social media aggregates that only link to one or a few different sites. Sharing buttons encourages users to interact and share from your feed. Another thing that stood out with Flow-Flow is the developer support. The documentation is very helpful, straightforward and answered most of the questions I had. The developers have also been very responsive and cooperative with Flow-Flow users. This kind of ongoing support and collaboration with users gives this plugin the potential to make some big waves in the WordPress community.

Social Media Sites Currently Supported

• Facebook – home timeline, user feed, hashtag search, favorites
• Twitter – new feed, user posts, public pages, groups
• Soundcloud – public playlists, songs, podcasts
• Google+ – any public profile
• LinkedIn – get company updates
• Instagram – timeline, user photos, hashtag search, liked photos
• Pinterest – any public user or board
• Foursquare – location photos, tips
• Vine – public feed, user likes
• Flickr – user or public photos
• Dribbble – user likes, public items
• Vimeo – public videos of user, channel and likes
• YouTube – channel search, user, and public playlists
• Tumblr – post photos
• WordPress – blog posts, comments, categories, comments of specific posts
• Any RSS feed

Features

There’s a ton of great features on Flow-Flow. Once you get to know this plugin, it’s really easy to setup and modify inside your WordPress dashboard. Manage content from the intuitive admin panel and watch your changes take place with a live preview. Let’s explore some of Flow-Flow’s key features.

• Easy for anyone to use
• Use filters to moderate content. Exclude posts by word, username, or URL. Stop spammers and block trolls!
• Integrates easily with your theme.
• Tons of customization on design and behaviour.
• Shortcode Integration. Plugin won’t load until the shortcode is embedded on your page. Add a social stream in any page or block on your site.
• Sharing buttons makes it possible for visitors to share and interact with your feed.
• Seamless, clean, responsive feeds.
• No coding required!
• SEO friendly since all content is located on one page.
• Choose how to moderate your content with filters.
• Load items in your stream with the “show more” button
• Supports Vimeo, YouTube and Instagram video steaming.
• Unlimited feeds and unlimited streams.
• Smart server caching. Images are calculated on the server, giving your grid a lightning load time.
• Well Documented. Documentation provides very simple step by step guides. I made my stream up and running in 5 minutes.
• Beautiful lightbox galleries.

How Plugin Works

Before you can use Flow-Flow, you will have to authenticate with your social network first. It’s not a limitation of the plugin, it’s just the way social networks handle API. The documentation has a step by step guide on how you can authenticate all the most popular social media sites. Consult the documentation for easy instructions on authenticating your feed. Once you do that it couldn’t be any simpler.

You can create a stream with Flow-Flow by copying the shortcodes in the admin. You can paste the shortcodes into any block or page you want to. Plugin uses CSS3 to transform the animation and I was quite impressed with it’s speed. As mentioned earlier, the smart server caching eliminates long load times. When a stream is displayed for the first time on your site, it will be cached. The first time it loads it will take longer, but once it has cached it load times will be lighting fast. The more users who view your feed, the faster the load time gets. This feature saves a lot of bandwidth and API calls. That is guarantees the plugin will run at max speed.

Design and Layout

Flow-Flow: Social Streams offers premium customization options for design and style. You have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing a combination of colors and streams. If you know any CSS, you can alter Flow-Flow’s files to customize the look even further. This plugin definitely has a lot of prebuilt layouts and styles that look amazing. Check out the live demo to see some stunning examples of what you can do with your grid. Following are some of the most notable style and layout features Flow-Flow has to offer:

• Responsive design that feels great on mobile devices.
• Highly Customizable. Change the colors, margins, grid dimensions etc.
• Beautiful hover and animation effects.
• Custom design for narrow blocks like sidebar.
• It’s Fun! Yes I said it. This plugin is fun! It’s super responsive and easy to browse and share.
• Stunning design layouts. Your feed is displayed on an aesthetically pleasing grid.
• Makes images and videos look great.
• Works great with any WordPress theme.

Conclusion

The documentation was straightforward and my social feeds loaded quickly. You also have the option to showcase images from photo sharing sites to display in a lightbox. This makes your photos look beautiful on any device. Another thing I liked is that there were zero problems during the install, and it integrates great with WordPress. I’m not an expert coder so the shortcodes and visual editor made putting up my feed a piece cake.

There are tons of layout options and tools to customize the design, making it easy for anyone to put up a professional social media grid. Not only is Flow-Flow fast and responsive, it looks really nice too. For the price, it’s more than worth the cost. Get tons of traffic and SEO benefits with Flow-Flow: Social Streams. All in all this plugin was pretty awesome to test drive. Flow-Flow: Social Streams is an excellent choice for anyone looking to draw users to their site. I gave this plugin 5 out of 5 stars!