Tools to Display Tweets at an Event
A friend of mine recently asked me if I knew of any tools that would allow him to display tweets on a display (on a TV screen, digital projector or monitor). I knew there must be many tools out to this as I have seen tweets displayed at quite a few events I attended in the past. I told him I would have to do some research.
Unsurprisingly (when it comes to Twitter) there are indeed many tools to do such a job. Unfortunately, each have their set of pros and cons. As I think this might be of interest to other people out there, I thought I’d post my findings here.
There are a few factors you will need to take into consideration:
- Price. Do you want something for free or low cost, or are you happy to spend a little more?
It really depends on the event and who is organising it. If it is a charity event or something more personal (like a party) then you may not want to or have the funds available to spend much money. If it is a larger event with some sponsorship backing, then you could justify the cost of a paid tool. - Moderation.
Are you happy to let anything go? Perhaps you can trust the people who are likely to use a particular hashtag (although I’d definitely be cautious of that approach!) Do you want swear words and profanity automatically filtered out, or do you want to accept or deny each Tweet manually? - Display- Look & Feel.
How do you want each tweet displayed? Do you want one tweet at a time? Are you happy with a long list of tweets? Do you want a custom background?
Now that we’ve thought about those points, let’s delve into some of the tools out there. Remember, this isn’t an exhaustive list. If you feel I’ve missed a really great Twitter display tool, then please mention it in the comments!
1. Twitter Widgets – Free
Twitter widgets enable you to put a twitter stream on your website. They offer a bit of customisation and they are free. You’ll have to host this on a web page, and it may need a bit of tweaking so it can go full screen.
<script charset="utf-8" src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script> <script> new TWTR.Widget( { version: 2, type: 'search', search: '#socialmedia', interval: 30000, title: 'Social Media', subject: 'Tweets on Social Media', width: 'auto', height: 600, theme: { shell: { background: '#8ec1da', color: '#ffffff' }, tweets: { background: '#ffffff', color: '#444444', links: '#1985b5' } }, features: { scrollbar: false, loop: true, live: true, behavior: 'default' } }).render().start(); </script>
Then, post the above in a web page and you should be good to go. Here is an example that I created for the hashtag #socialmedia. You’ll have to have a play with the height to get it to display in your browser window. I changed mine to 600 pixels. The text is a bit small and not overly professional, but it’s quick and easy and free!
2. Twitter Fountain – Free/€24.95 for 3 months
There are quite a few great things about Twitter Fountain. Firstly there is a free version which still gives you loads of features and levels of customisation. You can set up lots of different advanced search options such as words, people (including filtering out certain words) and even by location (for example only include Tweets within a certain radius of a location).
The down side with the free version is that you will get the odd message saying “This visualisation is brought to you by Twitterfountain, the original”.
To remove this and to get moderation you’ll need the paid version, which is very reasonable- €24.95 for 3 months. This will probably cover you for your event, or perhaps for a couple if you have more than one close together. If moderation is important to you, then this probably is the best option for you.
Here is a demo that I created using the free version of Twitter Fountain with the same hashtag- #socialmedia. Find out more at Twitter Fountain.
3. triqle – €250 per event
- Moderate tweets
- Customise design including adding your logo
- Display multiple hashtags/search terms
This isn’t going to fit everyone, but for medium to large events, €250 per event, isn’t too much for such a professional display.
4. visibletweets.com – Free
The display of Tweets on visibletweets isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I actually quite like it. It displays one tweet at a time, which I think is preferable at an event. There aren’t many layout and design options- you have three animations and can search by hashtag or by using any Twitter search operators. Here is a visibletweets.com demo, again using the hashtag, #socialmedia
You can’t moderate any tweets or filter out any dodgy words, so you might want to think twice about it depending on how much you can trust the people using your hashtag. You can however use another service, TidyTweet with visibletweets. TidyTweet works in conjunction with visibletweets and allows you to moderate your tweets before they appear. Unfortunately it’s quite pricey at $100 per month. I am surprised that’s described as “reasonable” for personal and business use, but, depending on your event, this might be justifiable.
5. Twitterfall – Free
6. Tweetwally.com – Free
7. TweetBeam – Free/Commercial
You can filter out words using the “block words” field in the filter section although this may require quite a few words if you want to block out all profanity you could think of! These filters are applied in real time, so there would be nothing stopping you adding an extra word to the block list if you see a Tweet on the display with a rather unwelcome word!
There appears to be more advanced features for the commercial version, but I have yet to find out whether this includes moderation. The founder of TweetBeam, Yousef El-Dardiry, mentioned in the comments after I originally posted this article, that they are able to provide more advanced customisation including logos.
You can see a demo of a presentation powered by TweetBeam using the #socialmedia hashtag here.
8. Refynr – From $2,000
Refynr was launched back in 2010 as a Twitter conference tool very similar to the others in this list. In February this year there was a change of direction, moving from a relatively inexpensive simple tool to a pricey but fully managed events package. The article “Refynr Brings Communication To Conferences At The Speed Of Twitter” from Austin Startup goes into more detail about this change.
Founder & CTO Aaron Longnion was kind enough to fill me in with more information-
a) we are full-service (so event planner/organizers can concentrate on other things),
b) we constantly monitor & filter the feeds, or can hand-pick the best ones, and
c) we are about to offer a new technology where people can send a text message (SMS) and it will show up in the Twitter feed automatically.
If you are looking for a fully managed solution with filtering and moderation for a large event then Refynr might be the ticket. Aaron says they are targeting more than 400 attendees who will be active on Twitter and/or SMS. They provide custom designed & branded dashboards which are available a week before and after the event. For more information visit the Refynr website (there’s a demo there too).
9. Make Your Own! – Free
You could always script your own, or at least base it on someone else’s work. Melbourne freelance web developer, Rohan Latimer, came up with his own script for a friend’s party called Twitter Party. You can see the demo here and find out more about how to build it using his tutorial. I’m sure it’s quite easy to tweak, and even build in your own profanity filter if you know some Javascript. Have a peak on how Tom Scott did it for his fun app, Klouchbag by looking at the source code. There are some naughty words in there, so beware!
I’m in the process of building my own, and I’m looking at having moderation and offensive word filtering. I’ll let you know how I get on!
Conclusions
Make sure you check Twitter’s guidelines on displaying Tweets. This gives information on how you should be displaying the tweets on your screen. It’s particularly important to show the Twitter logo or bird logo and to include the Twitter handle for the tweet.
There are also a number of options on how you could display the tweets. If it is during a talk or debate you can project them on the main screen (or a secondary one) live at the event using a digital projector. Another way is to use a desktop or laptop computer plugged into a large monitor.
As always, if you have any ideas, tips or questions, be sure to leave it in the comments below.
how to delete tag posts from tweetbeam wall?
Hi Dan. Sorry for the delay, I’ve been away on holiday. To be honest I don’t know if that is possible. I’ve reached out to them to ask.
Hi Ian!
Let me also recommend our solution Yarr TV for displaying Twitter tweets and photos on screens: feel free to [email protected] if we can help 🙂 https://www.yarr.tv/features/twitter-tweets-wall/
Cheers!
Rafa Roda @ Yarr TV
Thanks, Rafa. Looks good!
I recently used visibletweets for an event at my college campus. We had a panel discussion on racism in the nation and on our campus. The students really loved the visibletweets display and I got a lot of very positive feedback. The only problem was that it kept displaying the same people over and over again and several people after the event were upset their tweets weren’t displayed. Does anyone have any idea why this happened? Do you think user privacy settings prevented their tweets from going on display? I also just gave it a try with http://www.showtweets.com, and experienced the same thing. Thoughts?
Thanks for your comment. That’s really odd. Did you contact the guys at visibletweets to see if they could shed some light on this? I haven’t used one of these tools at an event for a while, so it’s not something I’ve encountered. Do let me know how you get on. Ian
We have used Amazewall ( https://amazewall.com/ ) at our events for a few years now and always had superb support prior to, during and post show! You can fully brand it & include different streams so it looks great and you have the option of having filters in place.
https://amazewall.com/
https://vimeo.com/70894007
Thanks for this. It looks really impressive. However, there are no prices on the website and it says you should contact them. To me that means it costs $$$$! Can you give us any idea of the pricing?
Thanks!
Ian
Hi Ian! Here you go, pricing information is mentioned here:
https://amazewall.com/pack-information
Jan :o)
Thanks, that’s really helpful. Not as expensive as I had thought. Looks like a good service.
No problem – we’ve always been really happy with the service they provide! It’s great to be able to share! Jan
We just released a great free tool to display Tweets at an event: ShowTweets http://www.showtweets.com
It’s super simple to use and takes 5 seconds to set up. We think it looks great too!
Thanks guys. I have had a quick look and it does look quite snazzy. The free version (pre-registration) will be really useful for many people but it is good to see you offer options to customise. I couldn’t see any further information on this without signing up. Do you have a page that explains the features and the difference between the free version and the paid one? Also how much is the paid version? Do you offer moderation facilities?
Thanks!
Ian
Hi Ian,
Thanks for taking a look. We wanted to get this out in the wild and the response has been great. ShowTweets is a free offering from Crowd Convergence with simple hashtag search. Design customisation, content aggregation from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, filtering and full moderation is available on Crowd Convergence: http://www.crowdconvergence.com/twitter-walls/
Thanks!
Carla
Hi Ian, great look at different options out there.
You should take a look at Crowd Convergence:
http://www.crowdconvergence.com
We’ve got lots of filtering including presets for profanity, retweets and more. Flexible and customisable output options for all types of displays and fast, simple moderation. Of course we can customise for any branding too!
Hi! Another option for social media display is Postano: http://www.postano.com/blog/social-media-displays-for-events. It aggregates all kinds of social media (including Tweets, mentions, Facebook, Instagram etc) into a nice magazine-like layout. I’ve been messing around with Postano for a few weeks, and I think it’s definitely worthy of consideration if you are looking to display social media at an event…
Thanks, Brent- really interesting article- particularly about the reasons why people aren’t using Twitter displays at events and why they should. I’ll check out Postano. You’re comment is quite timely as I am looking at updating this article a little since there seems to be a few other tools on the market. Thanks!
No problem! It’s definitely a quickly evolving space and, like the article said, awareness is one of the main barriers to displaying SM at events. Thanks for providing this info!
We’ve recently launched http://twitterfontana.com. It’s an open source Javascript/HTML5 based Twitter Fountain. Offers loads of (visual) customization in your browser. Or you can fork the code on GitHub and implement any features your missing 😉
Wow, thanks for this. It looks great, and even better that it’s on GitHub! I’d love it if there was a way to moderate before tweets were allowed, but I am not sure how that could be implemented. It would also be good if a bank of offensive words could be pasted in for blocking. Thanks so much for sharing, I’ll try and add this to the list when I get the chance!
I like the look of TweetBeam, with its full-screen option, and you can set up various shows in advance, with quite a few useful options.
It also allows for some automatic moderation, as you can add ‘banned words’ in the filters tab of the set-up. However, this does rely on you having a list of words you want banned in the first place…
Thanks for the comment. It’s good to learn that TweetBeam has a filter system, but as you say, it sounds like it requires you put in the naughty words in the first place. I know you can do this with many of the other tools I mentioned. Perhaps their paid version has more control. I’ll let you know once I find out more.
Hi! Founder of TweetBeam here, thanks for your article and mentioning us. As Phil pointed out, you can access more advanced controls here: http://www.tweetbeam.com/manage after you have signed in.
The filter options are applied to the show on the fly. So if you add new users or words you want to prevent from showing up while your show is being displayed, matching tweets will be removed immediately.
For professional events, we can always work together to fit your needs (such as custom logo display, etc.). See http://www.tweetbeam.com/commercial.
We’re always looking for feedback!
Thanks for letting us know more of the options. I’ll have a play myself when I get the chance. Good to know the filter options are applied on the fly. How about moderation (i.e. deciding in advance whether to accept a tweet to display or not)? It would be useful to have some indication on prices too!
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