7 tools to present a Twitter stream at your event

Comment 27 January 2015: This post is more than 3 years old, but it still gets many daily views. It’s great you guys still find it useful! Let me encourage you to check the comments section, too, because you’ll find many more services for streaming social media content at your event! Cheers, Michael

For a number of reasons, Twitter and events are a good match:

• Before the event, it is a great tool to spread the word about the contents of your event (speakers, topics etc.), to engage and to connect with potential attendees.
• During the event, it is perfect to add a virtual component to your conference or meeting, by linking the real life audience with the tweeps out there.
• It is also great to collect feedback, questions, do polls during the event.
• After the event, it allows you to refer back to useful content like slides, videos, blog summaries etc. You can also track and analyze who took part in the discussions, what the sentiment was, what you can improve and what was particularly appreciated.
• It is a perfect foundation to create a post-conference review, using Storify. Check out this example from the Emerge Conference 2011 in Oxford.

In order to motivate the delegates to join in the Twitter discussion and to demonstrate what happens in parallel on Twitter, it is a good idea to show the live feed on site. There are a number of tools out there that facilitate this, and most of them are free!

Twitterfountain.com

This tool can be customized regarding backgrounds, colors, pictures, speed of display. We used it at the recent World Newspaper Congress in Vienna. It is a good tool, and you just have to go to the website, make our adjustments like twitter keyword, hashtag, animation type, background colors, you click on full screen and you’re done. You can also embed the Twitterfountain on your own website.

Visibletweets.com

A bit more artistic, from my point of view, with less options but a very nice visualization. Takes maybe 5 seconds to set up, click on “View full screen”, done!

Tweetwally.com

This is a more static implementation, but it allows you to enter some text at the side and display your own twitter handle. Easy to set up, too, good readability. Nothing fancy, the tweets are in the focus rather than a creative display.

Triqle “What’s on?”

This is actually a mobile platform for your event that offers a lot of features, like a web app to display real time program information, mobile voting or narrowcasting on screens around the show. You can also use it to display tweets during the event, which the guys from ICCA did at their Congress in Leipzig. It comes at a price, but it is quite affordable.

Twitterfall

Another free, simple, easy-to-use tool that displays tweets at your wall.

TweetBeam

Nice service, displaying the tweeps’ pics in the background automatically.

Refynr

This solution goes a step further and allows you to create a custom dashboard with event branding, sponsor branding, and automatic display of twitpics. The cost is between 1 and 2 USD per day and attendee, depending on the features.

Most of those services allow tweet display based on hashtags, keywords, Twitter names, or even a combination of those.

Don’t forget to determine a good event hashtag well in advance, start using it yourself as an organizer and notify your audience about it.

Your hashtag should be

• unique (check if any other conference or topic use it)
• as short as possible (not taking up too much of the 140 characters)
• intuitive.

Click to tweet: 7 tools to project a twitter stream at your event http://bit.ly/1b14PPv #eventprofs #smm #eventtech #engage365