Recently, our organization decided to implement real-time tweet displaying along with our PowerPoint based Base Camp and Leadership Summit training. We will be displaying the tweets at the training site on the big screens. Therefore, I investigated eight different tweet displaying services to determine what is the best option to do it.

My first intuition was to embed tweets directly inside of the PowerPoint presentations. Simply by Googling, I found the highest ranked tutorial for doing so by Liz Gross at her blogsite. Following her instruction, I tested out all the Tweet-displaying services listed in her post, plus three more: Twubs, TweetWall, Tweet Chat, and Hootfeed. I use the PowerPoint 2013 Pro. My testing result shows that among the eight choices, only three of them were able to be correctly displayed within the PowerPoint, which are: TwitterBeam, Hootfeed, and TweetFall. All the others show error messages such as “script error” or “Jason not defined”.

Since for PowerPoint 2013 users, in addition to the steps mentioned by Liz’ blog post, it took extra `steps for me to set up the tweet webpages so that they will display in the PowerPoint. I wonder whether this is the reason why more than half of the tweet services were able to correctly display within the PowerPoint. So I think it is worth to sharing the process for others to learn from.

First of all, the download link for the free LiveWeb Add-in is missing from the How-to Geek tutorial. It is easy to find, but just in case, you can go here: http://skp.mvps.org/liveweb.htm#.VEASLfldV8E

Second, for PowerPoint 2013, you will have to manually change the registry subkey for each computer that your PowerPoint would display the embedded Tweet feeds from. To do this, follow the instruction here.

Third, remember to save your PowerPoint as “.pptm” format (PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Presentation).

After doing all the above, only one commercial service and two free services fully support displaying Tweet feeds inside of Powerpoint (at least it is the situation for Powerpoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2013). They are:

TwitterBeam:

Hootfeed:

and TweetFall:

TweetFall claims not officially supporting PowerPoint embedding. However, their first layout design would work when embedded with PowerPoint, and their price is good:

Below is a table comparing the main features of these tweet displaying services:

So after all these experimenting, we have decided to go with TweetFall using its first layout design.