Social Media Wall Integration

A social media wall is a screen that displays live social posts — hashtag campaigns, event attendee photos, brand mentions — rendered inside a template you designed rather than as a raw platform embed. On SpinetiX, the player fetches the posts as JSON from a social aggregation API or a platform API and draws them into your own layout, fonts and colours. Typical refresh is every 1–5 minutes: fresh enough to read as live, without hammering API rate limits. It is a content source, not a separate product — the same player that runs the lobby menu board can run the social wall zone alongside it.

Any platform that exposes an API or an embeddable feed — in practice Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. SpinetiX players fetch the posts through an aggregation service or directly from platform APIs and render them in custom-designed templates instead of iframing a platform widget. Direct platform APIs are the right route for your own account's content: Instagram Basic Display API for your own posts, X (Twitter) API v2 for your own timeline, LinkedIn Company Page API for company posts.

An aggregation service does the collecting, not the player. Walls.io, Taggbox or Curator.io monitor the hashtags, accounts and keywords you specify across multiple platforms, apply your moderation rules, and expose the approved posts as a single JSON API. The SpinetiX player polls that one API — typically every 1–5 minutes — and renders the posts in a branded template. That indirection is what lets one screen mix Instagram, X and LinkedIn content without your organisation holding and maintaining six separate sets of API credentials.

Walls.io, Taggbox and Curator.io are the three that come up most often: Walls.io for multi-platform aggregation with a moderation dashboard, Taggbox for hashtag campaigns with analytics and moderation, Curator.io for curation with approval workflows. Any of them works with SpinetiX because the integration point is a JSON API, not a proprietary plugin. Be clear on the commercial side: these are third-party subscriptions billed separately from the signage platform and its licences, and they — not the player — are the party holding approved platform API access.

Yes, and it is not optional. A public screen showing an unmoderated hashtag will eventually display something the brand cannot defend — that is a question of time, not luck. Aggregation services supply the tooling: profanity filters, image recognition for inappropriate pictures, a manual approval queue, blocklists for specific accounts and keywords, and a kill switch that removes all social content and drops back to fallback branding. For a hotel lobby or a stadium concourse, run manual approval; automated filtering alone is not a defence anyone wants to explain afterwards.

Only through approved routes. Instagram has restricted API access: use the Instagram Basic Display API for your own account's content, or an aggregation service that holds approved Instagram API access for hashtag and mention content. Direct scraping violates Instagram's terms of service and breaks the moment the platform changes its markup, so it is not a foundation for a permanent installation. Expect platform terms to keep tightening — that is the main argument for sitting behind an aggregator that maintains the platform relationship for you.

The wall goes stale, not black. The SpinetiX player caches the last-fetched feed locally and keeps rendering it, because content and playback logic live on the player rather than on a server — the posts simply stop updating until the API answers again, then the wall resumes automatically. Design that state deliberately: stamp the zone with a retrieval time, or switch to fallback brand content once the feed passes a staleness threshold you define, because a wall showing three-day-old posts as though they were live reads as abandoned.