Twitter Walls
When discussing how to increase social media engagement prior to the conference, we talked through various options and decided to create a Twitter Wall, which is a webpage showing a visual   representation of Tweets relating to a hashtag for display at events.

Tweetwall.com

Having researched the various providers I suggested we use Tweetwall.com as it had good feedback online about its ease of use and at USD29 per event, it was good value.

It was easy to set up the Twitter Wall using the #HTW2014 hashtag. Tweetwall’s online tool offers various levels of moderation so you can manage what is displayed on your Twitter Wall during the event.

On the day, a screen and projector in the exhibition hall helped showcase the Twitter Wall and encouraged delegates to get involved.

Having Tweeted for MemberWise before at events, I could see that there was an increase in engagement on Twitter.

The results
Tweetwall also provide stats relating to your Twitter Wall. You can see the stats for Harnessing the Web below:

There was lots of activity and the audience in impressions terms reached over 650,000. The majority of content that was created was interesting facts from the conference, so it is great that such a wide potential audience were able to see highlights from the event.

There were also lots of sponsors and suppliers that were very active on Twitter, and if we do it again it would be good to see more membership professionals getting involved.

Top 5 tips
Here are my top five tips for using a Twitter Wall at your event:

  1. Make sure you have the space and equipment to display the Twitter Wall – there isn’t much point if you don’t!
  2. Choose the right platform. In addition to Tweetwall there is also TweetBeam and CrowdScreen, so decide which one suits your needs.
  3. Ensure you promote your hashtag well before the event as Richard did with Harnessing the Web – it needs to be everywhere.
  4. Continue to encourage engagement during the event by reminding people to Tweet and by actively managing your own Twitter feed.
  5. Beef up the Wifi if you can. Most conference venues will have good Wifi, but will it be able to cope with 200 people all accessing their devices at once?