Social walls
A social media wall, and how to build one properly.
What a social wall is, which networks you can pull from, what it costs to run, and what changes when it goes on a screen at an event instead of a page on your site. Vitraz builds one from the accounts you already post from, with no code.
What is a social media wall?
A social media wall, or social wall, is a single curated feed that gathers posts, reviews and videos from across several social networks and displays them together, on a website, on a screen at an event, or on both. Someone chooses what appears, which is the difference between a social wall and a firehose.
Social wall means the same thing, and the two terms are used interchangeably, though “social media wall” is the one more people search for. What varies is the situation. A wall on a product page runs for months and is read at arm's length. A wall at a conference runs for three days, is read from ten metres, and needs someone watching it. The pages below are organised by that difference rather than by feature.
Walls, by situation
Events is the parent case. Conference, live and wedding are situations with their own failure modes; hashtag is a collection mechanism rather than a place; signage is the permanent installation that runs for months without anyone in the room.
Social wall for events
The parent case: big screen, event website and phones at once. Covers the thing everyone forgets, which is that it must not look empty in the first hour.
Conference social wall
Several days, parallel tracks, speaker mentions and sponsors who will ask what they got. Day three is the hard part, and the moderation rota is a staffing decision.
Live social wall
What "live" honestly means when a refresh cadence is involved, where that is completely fine, and the two situations where it is not.
Hashtag wall
Collection by tag rather than by account. How the platforms meter it, why a tag has to be unusual to be useful, and why public does not mean licensed.
Wedding social wall
Guest photos on a screen during the reception, and all of it kept afterwards. It has to survive being completely unattended by the people it is for.
Digital signage
Lobby screens and retail displays that run unattended for months and are read from across a room. Reading distance changes every other decision.
Which wall page applies to you
These situations overlap enough that people land on the wrong one. The two questions that actually separate them are how long it runs and who is watching it while it does.
| If you are running | For how long | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A conference or festival | Two to five days | Conference social wall |
| A single-evening event | A few hours | Social wall for events |
| A campaign around a tag | Weeks to months | Hashtag wall |
| A wedding or private party | One evening, unattended | Wedding social wall |
| A lobby or retail screen | Months, unattended | Digital signage |
| Anything where speed is the question | Any | Live social wall |
How do you build a social wall?
Connect the accounts the posts will come from, decide what qualifies to appear, pick a layout suited to the reading distance, and embed it or open it on the screen. The work that actually takes time is none of those four. It is deciding who moderates, and when.
- Connect sources first, because everything downstream is easier once real posts are in the workspace
- Seed the wall before it goes up: a wall that opens empty is the single most common way this goes wrong
- Choose the layout for the reading distance, not for how it looks on your laptop
- Set moderation deliberately: hand-approval, auto-approve, or tagged-posts-only are three genuinely different events
- Test it on the actual screen, at the actual distance, before the day
Does a social wall need moderation?
On a public tag, yes, always. Anything a stranger can put on your screen by typing a hashtag will eventually be something you would not choose, and the gap between it appearing and someone noticing is the whole risk. On your own accounts the calculus changes completely.
- Own accounts only: auto-approve is fine, because you already approved it when you posted it
- A public hashtag: hand-approval, or you are running an open publishing channel on a screen you control
- Anything projected in a room with press in it deserves a named person watching, not a rota nobody signed
- Hiding a post removes it from your wall in one click; it stays on the network, which is the correct boundary
What does a social wall cost?
Nothing to start. The free plan runs one feed on one website with two free sources and no card, which is enough for a small wall or to prove the idea. Paid plans exist for more feeds, more sources, faster refresh and removing our badge.
- The variable that usually decides the plan is refresh cadence, not the number of posts
- Views are counted once per viewer per day rather than per page load, which matters on a site with several pages carrying the wall
- A wall on a screen at an event is one website for limit purposes, the same as a page
- Nothing is cut off mid-month for going over, see the pricing page for how the meter actually behaves
Social walls, answered
Nothing. The two terms mean the same thing and are used interchangeably across the industry. Some people reserve "social wall" for the website version and "social media wall" for the big screen, but no product draws that line, and neither do we.
Yes, and that is usually the point. One feed can mix Instagram, YouTube, Google reviews, LinkedIn and RSS, ordered by recency or curated by hand. You can also keep networks separate and embed each as its own wall on a different page.
Two ways. Either the wall follows accounts you own, in which case posting to that account puts it in the queue, or it follows a hashtag, in which case anyone using the tag can submit. The second needs moderation; the first mostly does not.
Yes. The same curated feed can be embedded on your site and opened full-screen on a display, in different layouts, with the same moderation applying to both. Approving a post shows it in both places at once.
On a schedule set by your plan, from daily on Free down to every five minutes on Scale. That is fast enough for a wall people glance at over an evening and too slow for a countdown or a live reveal, the live social wall page is honest about exactly where that line falls.
Keep reading
Social media aggregator
The tool side: what each network will actually hand over
Social media aggregatorWidgets by network
What each platform will and will not hand over
Widgets by networkLayouts
Which templates suit a screen read from ten metres
LayoutsPricing
Refresh cadence is usually the deciding variable
PricingBuild your first feed today.
The free plan connects a source, renders every layout and gives you the embed code. No card, no expiry.
Start free