Checklist For Your Event's Live Social Media Wall

Event professionals know a social media wall for events is the simplest and most effective way to engage your audience before, during, and after your event. You've done your research and decided your going to implement a social media displays throughout your space.

And now that you've decided on a Spotlyte social media wall, let's go through a brief checklist to get ready for your event.

1. Specify your content
   Edit your Spotlyte and specify your content. You can monitor your own accounts, pages, or hashtags. Read here for tips on choosing a good hashtag for your event

2. Customize Your Display
   There are several themes in the Spotlyte Display Editor that are perfectly suited for live displays and screens. These themes will flip, scroll, or animate content onto the screen. If someone posts new content, it will appear nearly immediately onto your screen. In certain themes, such as Waterfall, the new content can be configured so that it pops-up in the center of the screen when it arrives. This gives more attention to new posts, and encourages users to post as they get to see the effect of their post immediately.
   Can't decide which themes you like the best, show your best user generated content in multiple themes using Spotlyte display loops.
   New themes and options are added all the time, so the best way to stay up to date on what's possible is to open up the Display Editor and click around.
   Watch this video to see some of our themes and possible configurations:

1. Show it Everywhere
   Have multiple screens at your conference? Your display can be shown on all of them. Did you know you can create several different displays for each one of your screens all driven from the same Spotlyte. You can use the Display Editor configuration to create different social media displays.
   You may want want to highlight only images and media. Or one to show and display sponsors. Or another one that focuses on a specific topic or hashtag for your event.

2. Add Your Partners and Sponsors
   Have partners or sponsors you want to display more prominently on your screens? Tag their content or logos as Featured content in your dashboard and they'll appear periodically in your social media wall. See exactly how to add featured content to your social media wall

3. Curate Your Content
   Be sure to review all the automatic and manual ways you can moderate and curate content during your event. A moderated social media wall keeps your public displays on message and free of unwanted or inappropriate content.

4. Engage Your Audience
   You want to make sure and encourage activity around your social media walls. Visibly show which hashtags or accounts your audience should include to appear on your wall. Put up banners around your event space, broadcast it in your messaging, and most importantly include it in the display itself.
   Encourage your audience to post more by starting a social media contest and show a real time Leaderboard of your most active attendees.
   Looking for a Question and Answer tool, take a look at our Take Over effect for live event displays.

5. Invite team members to be moderators
   The days of the event will be busy, the last thing you'll want to do is to babysit your social media wall. All the automated curation rules and tools that are built into Spotlyte are meant to save you that hassle. But there are occasions where some manual moderation will still be required. You can invite other team members to assist with the moderation of your social media wall.

6. Don't forget your website
   Using the multiple display configuration capability mentioned earlier, you can easily create a social wall to embed onto your website. Drive your website visitors to purchase tickets by showing the excitement and buzz around your upcoming event.

7. Get Creative
   Looking for some creative ideas on how other brands used social media to engage, attract, and interact with fans? See some of these great social media campaigns from brands at the Super Bowl

8. Check Your Hardware
   Showing a social media wall on a monitor just requires a laptop or machine to open the URL of your configured Spotlyte display. Then you can use a projector, an HDMI cable, or some type of ChromeCast/AppleTV device to share your browser window onto the device. The hardware requirements to setting up your social media wall are fairly minimal.
   
   If you're using a wireless solution be sure to check that the Wifi at the venue will allow your ChromeCast or AppleTV, some venues have these types of open devices locked down.
   

The Spotlyte team is constantly innovating and testing new ideas to help Event planners create a dynamic and exciting event experience. What great strategies have you've seen around the Event industry?

Follow us on Twitter at @getspotlyte to find out what else we're building at Spotlyte