At my internship this summer, everyone kept talking about
this “social waterfall” or “social wall.” I was pretty intrigued so I decided
to check it out for myself. From the link on the website, it brought me to
another page that sort of looked like Pinterest. It had a bunch of boxes with
pictures, tweets and videos all with the hashtag #cincytennis. I was instantly
entranced. I spent a little too much time on this page, but it was well worth
it.
It was so cool to see what everyone was saying about the
tournament! Everyone was posting selfies with the players, Instagram pictures
of the amazing food and the views from their seats during the matches. Since I
was basically stuck in a trailer all day, it was great to see what everyone was
doing around the grounds.
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| Roger Federer on the Champions Balcony https://www.facebook.com/cincytennis/photos/pb.71769289806.-2207520000.1409508713./1 0152422996289807/?type=3&theater |
Of course, now that the tournament is over, the social wall
has not seen much action lately. However, some people are still tweeting about
the winners, Serena Williams and Roger Federer, which is keeping the social
wall alive.
As I came to find out later, the U.S. Open also has a social
wall! I also decided to check it out and compare it with the Western &
Southern Open one. In my opinion, it was not as easy to navigate as the W&S
Open social wall. The U.S. Open wall is just one page with tiles, and updates the
tiles with new tweets and pictures, whereas the W&S Open one is a page
where you can keep scrolling and scrolling and the new updates add to the top.
Compare the two for yourself!
A social wall is a great thing to have for a socially active
event, like a tennis tournament. Of course, there is probably some strict
monitoring of what actually gets shown on the page. But, with a socially active
fan base, this page will definitely bring more traffic to your website and more
awareness of your social media platforms.
Kelly, I have never heard of social walls so I thought that your blog post was very interesting. It sounds like a really cool feature for an event such as the U.S. Open. With the cool features of a social wall why is it that you never hear about them? Why do we only hear about hashtags and twitter feeds? Do you think that social walls would work for things other than events such as universities like ONU?
ReplyDeleteLauren, thanks for reading! I definitely think these are a hidden secret and are pretty new as far as social media. I think these are great for events but maybe not for universities, just because, for example, ONU tweets so much less frequently than the U.S. Open, so the updates would be to slow to draw up any traffic. Also, ONU might have to monitor it more carefully because college student comments might get pretty crude sometimes, and they might view it as a waste of their time. But, we will see if social walls become more popular in the next few years!
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