If you are an event marketing professional, you know that Twitter live feeds are an integral part of every event. Events can be a lot to organise but luckily the Twitter feed setup is a fast and easy task. In less than five minutes, you can set up a Twitter hashtag feed, moderate entries, and share the curated feed with your event audience on digital screens, websites, and mobile apps.
Twitter live feeds help you engage your audience in sharing your branded hashtag, which immediately increases awareness and reach for your company and event. Not only that, an event hashtag builds a community among participants and helps guests connect online and offline. Through the hashtag feed, you can organise polls, ask your audience to send questions to speakers, and gather feedback and topic ideas for future events.
In addition to events, Twitter feeds often welcome visitors and employees to the office. A live Twitter feed on TVs in a lobby or brick-and-mortar shop makes it easy to broadcast your latest news and offers, and a visual, continuously updating content stream grabs people’s attention.
Also, a live Twitter feed can be a part of your company social wall on the homepage and news pages, combining content from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. For inspiration, check some of the best Twitter feed on website examples.
For webshop owners, user-generated content campaigns are great for gathering authentic customer experiences through Twitter, and you can embed UGC on product pages to show social proof.
Examples of live Twitter feeds in action
Let’s look at some of the best live Twitter feed examples through the lenses of Flockler customers.
Trade events and conferences
Your employees might both visit and organise trade events and conferences. For many industries, they are one of the best ways of finding new clients and partners. Conferences tend to focus on the latest advancements in a specific industry and allow you to exchange information with industry peers – often through the shared hashtag feed.
TEDx’s branded wall is an excellent example of a live Twitter feed for conferences. With easy-to-use customization tools, the wall colours are changed to match TEDx brand colours, and the interactive feed encourages the audience to participate in discussions before, during, and after the event.
University graduation events
There’s no university that wouldn’t organise a graduation event to celebrate the fantastic achievement with students and their families. And it’s hard to imagine a commencement ceremony without a social media feed, too.
Harvard Kennedy School’s social wall combining Twitter and Instagram is a perfect example. With one Flockler subscription, Harvard University shows live Twitter feeds on unlimited digital screens, websites, and other digital platforms.
Sports events
Sports fans love to share images and videos from matches - it’s often a family event with mums and dads saving money in advance for the special occasion.
The Rose Bowl game was first played in 1902, and the annual bowl has brought families together since 1916. A stunning, branded social media feed is shown on the video boards at the stadium.
Concerts and festivals
Going to a concert or festival is often an experience shared with friends. And not necessarily in the physical world but in images, videos, and Stories on various social channels.
Festival Republic, a company behind some of the largest music festivals in the UK, taps into the hashtag stream and shows live Twitter feeds on concert screens. Custom branded slideshows for each event rotate tweets and Instagram posts for the live audience - and with the moderation tools, Festival Republic’s team makes sure that inappropriate messages aren’t broadcasted.
With Flockler, event organisers can change hashtag feeds without losing the content stored in the past. In other words, they don’t need to pay an extra fee per event. One Flockler subscription plan is shared to cover all events during the year.
Virtual events
During the pandemic, many events moved to virtual and haven’t necessarily turned back ever since. A virtual event makes it possible to reach a wider audience, they are less expensive to organise, and the communities are built in online platforms without the need for participants to travel across the country.
For international organisations like the IMF, events have had a virtual side, long before the pandemic. Their dedicated IMFLive Twitter account informs about the upcoming schedule and shares real-time updates from events happening just now. Of course, live Twitter feeds supplement their event pages, allowing anyone to watch the event live stream and follow the discussion on Twitter.
Digital signage at the office and in public spaces
Many offices have digital displays and smart TVs on the walls, but keeping them up-to-date with the latest news and offers takes time and effort.
That’s one of the reasons why Silicon Valley Bank and many others have decided to bring live Twitter feeds to digital screens. Without any additional work from the internal communications team and with full automation, the latest news is shared with employees and visitors.
How to set up a live Twitter feed
After looking at the examples, I’m sure you are asking how easy it is to create a live Twitter feed.
It takes approximately five minutes.
And you don’t need any technical skills.
You only need a digital screen and a laptop with an internet connection and reliable battery. Then, just connect the laptop to the screen via cable or use AppleTV, Amazon Fire TV stick, or similar to connect wirelessly. Finally, open your Twitter feed from Flockler with a modern browser, and you are all set.
Here’s a four-step guide on how to set up a live Twitter feed on Flockler:
- Automatically collect tweets
- Moderate your Twitter feed
- Design your feed layout
- Display your live Twitter feed on any digital screen and website
1. Automatically collect tweets
The first step is to collect tweets by a hashtag (or multiple) automatically. With Flockler, you can gather tweets mentioning a specific hashtag or keyword and content from specific accounts. If needed, you can create multiple feeds and display them all in one place.
Most events combine Twitter and Instagram together, and Flockler’s got you covered on that too. Here’s a list of supported content sources that you can mix and bring into one place.
2. Moderate your Twitter feed
When adding your automatically updating content sources in step 1, you’ll decide whether the content is shown on the screen and TV immediately or you’ll moderate all tweets in advance.
If you choose to moderate all in advance, tweets will be found in Flockler’s Inbox. If you decide to show posts automatically, you can still click to hide any of them.
3. Design your feed layout
Now that you’ve got content streaming in, the next step is to design a layout for your event. As you noticed in the above examples, the layouts are fully customizable, and you can easily change the branding from one event to another. Flockler has four templates to help you get started with the live Twitter feed design.
You can create unlimited walls, grids, carousels, and slideshows. There are no page view limits either.
From the layout’s settings, you can adjust the design and add your brand’s look & feel to it. If, for some reason, Flockler’s layout editing tools won’t achieve your goals, Flockler’s customer success team (and your developers) can tailor each detail even further with custom CSS.
4. Display your live Twitter feed on any digital screen and website
Your setup work is done, and it’s time for the show. On Flockler, you’ll get URLs to show the live Twitter feed on digital screens and embed codes for websites and apps.
With the free version, the slideshow layout updates with new tweets automatically, while automated updates on the wall and grid layouts require either a yearly subscription or our event add-on. Please get in touch with Flockler’s team using the website chat if you are looking to use the wall and grid layouts in a live event.
What are the most important live Twitter feed features?
There are a couple of crucial features required from your live Twitter feeds - all supported by the Flockler platform, of course.
Unlimited layouts without page view limits
In addition to digital screens, events usually have a website and often a mobile app too. To make sure your social feed is accessible on all services, you’ll need multiple layouts without page view limits.
Custom design and look & feel
Each event has unique branding, and you might need to make screen-specific adjustments as well. With Flockler’s layout editor, it’s easy for an event marketing team to apply changes without the help of a technical team.
Live content updates
Your branded hashtag will get mentions throughout the event, and you’ll need a relatively fast update cycle to keep the Twitter wall interesting. With Flockler, the free version comes with 5-minute updates for the slideshow layout and by subscribing to a yearly plan or purchasing our event add-on, you’ll get access to one-minute updates for all layout options.
Instant support
You’ll not likely need a lot of help after successfully setting up the live Twitter feed following the step-by-step guide above. But if something goes wrong, having a live chat and phone number is helpful.
Reliable service for high content and page view volumes
The reliability of both fetching a high volume of updates from social media channels, and handling the traffic for layouts visible on various digital platforms, are important factors when choosing the platform. Flockler is trusted by organisations like Harvard University, GoPro, TEDx, and the Rose Bowl game to deliver the service to a potentially high number of concurrent viewers.
Reasonable pricing covering all events during the year
Are you looking to show Twitter live feeds on multiple events during the year? If yes, you might want to avoid paying a fee per event as it might become quite expensive. Instead, you can purchase any of the annual plans with Flockler and use the same subscription for all events during the year. There are no additional costs per event, and you can create a custom content feed and look & feel for each of them.
