Anyone with a basic knowledge of social media will be aware that the giants of the industry, such as Twitter and Facebook, are heavily focused on developing more and more ways for users to engage with their platforms on a live basis. More than ever, social media engagement, particularly for events, is happening in real time. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Harnessing the power of that social media engagement is increasingly effective for event marketers to implement well-executed social media strategies that:
- Demonstrate reach, both on site and externally.
- Generate user-created content.
- Offer real-time updates for attendees.
- Capitalise on opportunities for exposure.
- Drive discussion and engagement with attendees.
At Pufferfish we aim to offer clients the best functionality to optimise their events and make the PufferSphere a multi-functional event solution. For this purpose, we have developed TwitterSphere, a custom application that carries a live Twitter feed directly to the PufferSphere.
TwitterSphere combines the visual and tactile appeal of the PufferSphere and the real-time attraction of a live social media feed to provide an engaging social hub at the heart of any event. Event organisers can stimulate audience participation around event hashtags with curated tweets rendered natively on the PufferSphere and configured to move around the sphere dynamically.
Newly generated tweets are highlighted, expanding to cover a larger area of the screen on arrival. Using ‘on-sphere touch’ users can expand or shrink tweets to explore the feed. This is kept constantly refreshed, with old tweets deleted as new ones arrive. The app will even cache tweets where Internet connectivity is intermittent.
Completely customisable, the app can feature different styles of tweet windows, fonts, colours, backgrounds (static or video) and hashtags.
Additional integrations can be used to ramp up live engagement even further. For example, the use of 360° cameras supports more content generation where images or video can be sent directly to the sphere in real-time. Organisers can also offer users these assets as takeaway items for attendees to then upload to the platform of their choice. Or there's Vorb, a virtual orb software that curates video content around a single hashtag. Integrated with a PufferSphere, the Vorb becomes a physical entity which can be incorporated in a 'live video jukebox' capacity.
The development of TwitterSphere has opened up more functionality in our PufferPrime API, facilitating the handling of many hundreds of content windows and moving those windows around the sphere independently. With social media software constantly evolving and our constant assessment of the needs of our customers this is just the beginning for Pufferfish social integrations. Watch this space for more exciting expansions of PufferPrime capability.