If you’re wondering how to display social media interactions from around the world in a social media hub, our map layout is a perfect solution! We developed a customizable map for your social wall that shows posts in the location they were posted.
Map Styles and Customisation Options
The map layout is available in 6 different styles that determine the look of the map itself. You can choose the map style in your wall’s design settings.
You can choose between the following map styles:
- Classic for the classic Google Maps look
- Dark for a night-like blue-tinted map
- Light for an unobtrusive, neutral map
- Greyscale for an all-grey map
- Retro for a low saturation map with low-key browns and blues
- Muted Blue for an all-blue underwater look
The basis for the map styles is Snazzy Maps, a source for community-built map styles for Google Maps.
Like with all other layouts, you can, of course, customize your color scheme to your heart’s content. Change the color of your header, your background, or your tiles, and, of course, you can still customize your wall with CSS snippets.
Whether you embed it on your website or display it at a live event, at your school or office, the map is entertaining and fun.
How to Make Sure Posts Show up on Your Map Wall
For posts to show up at specific locations on a social wall using the map layout, the posts have to include geographical information. Currently, the majority of posts don’t contain geolocation — simply because, as a matter of safety, social networks don’t query this kind of information automatically. Users have to activate this, and most don’t turn geolocation on for their posts.
We have a way to remedy the geolocation issue with tweets, at least. Contrary to other networks, Twitter has a location field in user profiles. If someone has specified their location in their profile, we can automatically geocode this.
If someone has their profile location set to their hometown but posts tweets that aren’t geocoded from a holiday in New York, their NYC photo will be wrongly mapped to their hometown.
Make it a part of your campaign to ask users to enter their location whenever this is possible, either by disclosing their location in their user profile (Twitter only) or by using the geolocation button for tweets and Facebook posts. Unfortunately, the Instagram API does not provide any geolocation information. Your social wall map will not display any content from Instagram.
Here are some examples from the #IChoseUMich campaign where users have activated geolocation for their posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook:
We hope you enjoy the Walls.io map layout. If you’ve got any favorites from Snazzy Maps that you’d just love to see implemented for the map layout, let us know!