Adding A Twitter Stream To Your Squarespace Business Website

Image of Instagram and Twitter stream when building Kaizoku Alliance website

As a startup business, you need to build your website and be on social media.  Most business websites built now have some sort of live feed from a social media channel added to it.  Squarespace makes adding a live stream of a social media or social media channels to your website very easy.   This article will take explain how you can add a social media stream like Twitter to your Squarespace website and the best strategy to achieve this.  There is no coding involved in setting it up.

 Begin by signing in to your Squarespace account and click on ‘Settings’

• Go to ‘Connected Accounts’ and click on it
• Click on ‘Connect Account’ to add a social media platform like Twitter or Instagram

Then go to the page that you want to add the Twitter stream to

• At the spot, open up the insert box and find the ‘Twitter’ icon
• Hint - Use ‘Space’ blocks to adjust size of the ‘Twitter’ stream
• Click on the ‘Twitter’ icon to insert it on to the page
• Click on the ‘Twitter’ account that you want to stream
• Adjust how many tweets that you want to show in the stream example six tweets
• Save the settings and the ‘Twitter’ stream should appear on your web page

If you have been posting to your Twitter account the stream will appear.  If you have been posting to your Twitter account then the stream will show nothing.  We found this out the hard way.

The best strategy before adding a live social media stream to your web page is to post to the account regularly.  If you are going to post once a day and you are going to show six tweets in the stream then we suggest you not to set up the social media stream until the tenth day.  If you are going to post one a week, then set it up on the seventh week.  Apply this strategy to your other social media channels like Instagram or Facebook that you want to stream on your business website.

This article should save you some time and help you to set up a social media stream for your business website.  We really enjoy using Squarespace to build our website.  If you are more adventurous, you can inject the HTML code using the ‘Code’ block.  Have you done it this way on your site?  Did you hate or like using the ‘Code’ block?  

How we solved the problem of connecting Gmail to Squarespace

Image of Google Apps for business website

With Squarespace we saw that we could connect our business Gmail to the website.  This was perfect for us.  The problem started when we tried to set it up, we could not work it out.  We scoured Squarespace for the solution and the community section for an answer to our problem.  So if you are looking for a solution to connect Gmail to your Personal Squarespace site, then this is it.

Solution 1 – You haven't signed up to Google business apps

If you take Squarespace’s personal service, it is better to buy it through Squarespace.  To do this, go to ‘settings’ and then go to ‘emails’.  This should bring you up a screen that says ‘Professional email with Google Apps’ with the two options.  Choose the option you want and that should be it.  We assume Squarespace will set up your professional email; we didn’t do it this way.

Solution 2 – You signed up Google apps separately from Squarespace

The problem is due to the fact that the Google apps you have is external from Squarespace.  Your Gmail won’t work due to the fact that you need to set up the MX Records and you need access to your domain.  Please ensure that the Google Apps HTML code is embedded in your domain for verification before attempting this part.

Approach these steps with caution because changes you make can affect your domain on Squarespace. 

Begin by going to Opening DNS Settings. 

• Follow Step 1 to Request access to your DNS Settings.
• Step 2 should result in you receiving an email granting you access to your DNS Settings
• Then in Step 3 you need to log in to the Hosting account to make DNS changes
• Step 4 involves editing the records by going to the MX Records section and click on ‘Add’.  This should bring up your domain name (‘subdomain’), ‘priority’ and ‘Hostname’.

For the Priority and Hostname, we used Google Apps MX record values.  Place the priority and destination from Google support in to priority and hostname.  Ensure you place the alternate Google sites as well.

Example – In the MX records section put         1 (priority)       ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM (hostname)

Then go and use Google Apps Toolbox CheckMX tool to investigate if there are any potential problems with your DNS record configuration that might affect mail delivery to your domain.  You should see a majority of green ticks.

Finally, test your domain by sending an email.  If done correctly, the email you send to your domain should end up in your Gmail account. 

We like to give special thanks to Jennifer at Squarespace support for pointing us in the right direction to help solve our problem.  If people have gained Gmail through Squarespace, we’d like to know if they set it up for you.  Did this help solve your problem of setting up your separate Gmail and Squarespace accounts?