Are you struggling to balance engaging social media content with privacy regulations?
You’re not alone.
Many website owners face this challenge daily, and we’ve been listening to your concerns.
We’re excited to announce a significant enhancement to Smash Balloon’s social media feed plugins — we’ve added support for GDPR Cookie Compliance by Moove Agency and Real Cookie Banner GDPR plugins!
Why GDPR Compliance is Essential for Social Media Feeds
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. If you have website visitors from European Union countries, then this law applies to you.
GDPR compliance is really important for building trust with your users and ensuring long-term success.
While non-compliance can lead to significant fines – potentially up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue – the bigger picture includes safeguarding your reputation, avoiding legal complications, maintaining healthy website traffic, and securing your access to the European market.
But why is GDPR compliance particularly important for social media feeds, such as your embedded Instagram feeds, Twitter posts, Facebook feeds or YouTube playlists?
GDPR requires your website to get consent before processing personal data, including loading third-party content like social media feeds.
Since social media plugins often load content and scripts from external social media platforms, it’s crucial to manage these interactions in a GDPR-compliant way.
That’s why we’ve prioritized integrating Smash Balloon social feed plugins with reliable consent management solutions like GDPR Cookie Compliance and Real Cookie Banner.
How Does This Integration Work?
While we always recommend consulting with a legal professional to ensure full GDPR compliance, we’ve designed this integration to make displaying social media feeds on your website while adhering to GDPR guidelines as simple as possible.
- Initial GDPR-Compliant State: When a user visits your website, a GDPR-compliant version of your social media feeds will load initially.
This means certain interactive elements like videos won’t play automatically, and images may be loaded from local sources rather than directly from social platforms.
- Consent-Based Loading: Once the user gives their consent via the GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin or Real Cookie Banner plugin, the Smash Balloon feed plugin will load the full, interactive version of your social feeds.
This ensures no user data is processed without their explicit consent.
- Seamless Experience: This integration is designed to be smooth and intuitive for your website visitors.
How Does This Integration Benefit You?
- Save Time and Effort — Forget about complex coding or developer costs to make sure your social media feeds are GDPR-compliant, since our latest integration with GDPR Cookie Compliance and Real Cookie Banner helps you with this effortlessly.
- Compliance Made Easier — While we always recommend consulting legal experts for official guidance, these features are designed to simplify GDPR compliance for your social media content.
- Engage Responsibly — Keep your social media feeds dynamic and interactive while respecting your audience’s privacy.
- Proactively Minimize Risks — This newest integration helps you prevent the use of third-party CDNs and scripts.
- Strengthen Your Brand Trust — Show your audience you value their privacy, reinforcing your commitment to user trust and enhancing your brand’s reputation.
Using GDPR Cookie Compliance or Real Cookie Banner?
If you’re already using GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin or Real Cookie Banner plugin on your WordPress site, some parts of the feed will be limited to ensure GDPR compliance until consent is given by the user.
If you’re not using these or any GDPR plugins, you can still enable the GDPR settings in your Smash Balloon plugin settings.
From your specific Smash Balloon plugin, simply click on Settings » Feeds » GDPR to manually enable the GDPR setting.
This provides a basic level of compliance, though some functionality will be limited until consent is given.
For more details on how to configure our plugins to be GDPR-compliant, check out the following documentations:
- Custom Facebook Feed – GDPR Compliance
- Instagram Feed – GDPR Compliance
- Custom Twitter Feeds – GDPR Compliance
- Feeds for YouTube – GDPR Compliance
And that’s it for today! All these new integrations are available now. So if you don’t have them yet, get the world’s best social media feed plugins for WordPress today.
