Word Clouds are visual representations of what your audience was chatting about the most. It counts the amount of times specific words were submitted and displays the words most frequently used as larger within the cloud. The larger the word is displayed, the more often it was said by the audience.
Add a Word Cloud
Select the scene you'd like to add a Word Cloud to and open the Elements panel.
Select "Cloud" from the list. Choose a style, and click "Add."
You'll notice the Word Cloud is empty, that's because we have not adjusted our settings yet. Let's get to that next.
Word Cloud Settings
Word Clouds don't work like some of the other elements. You don't have to be live for them to work, and they can work retroactively. Let's dive in to explore that more.
In the Cloud Option menu, open the Design menu.
Choose a timeframe to pull messages from.
Now this depends on how you will be using the Word Cloud. For now, let's say we plan to show the Word Cloud at the end of our broadcast to see what the audience talked about the most. So in this case. We'll set the "Pull Messages From" time to the date and time of when the broadcast is set to begin and we will set the "Pull Messages To" time to when the broadcast is set to end ( we recommended tacking on an hour to that to give yourself some time in case the event goes over).
For this example, your Word Cloud will remain blank because we have set it to pull messages for a time in the future. Let's continue with the rest of our settings, and we'll talk about more ways to populate your Word Cloud later on.
Word Cloud Settings
The settings you choose for your Word Cloud are going to be very important. Let's take a look at them.
Total number of words in cloud: This is the number of words you want to be displayed in the cloud. This will depend on what you are looking to show. If you want to find the 20 most talked-about topics, then you will set that number to 20. If you have many viewers and just want to know what was talked about the most, you can increase that number. Consider how inclusive or exclusive you want to be and the number of chatters you expect to have.
Minimum number of letters in a word: This determines the type and quality of words you want to include. For example, setting the minimum to 2 will filter out things like "a," "I," single numbers, etc. However, if you want higher quality words, you might want to set the minimum higher than 2 to avoid some other common words. It's up to you to determine the types of words you want to include. If you take a peek at what's coming up ahead, you'll see that we've already pre-filtered some common words for you, so if you want to leave the minimum number of letters lower, you can.
Only display words that appeared this many times: Only display words that appeared this many times: This is the threshold you'll set for what you consider to be a "hot topic" or things the audience is talking about the most. This will depend on how many viewers you have. If you have a lot of viewers and therefore likely more people chatting, this number should probably be higher. If you have fewer viewers and likely fewer chatters, then this number should probably be lower.
Filtered words: As mentioned earlier, these are common words we have pre-filled for you, such as common verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and other filler words that are not compelling and will just take up space in your Cloud without providing insights into what your audience is actually saying. You can choose to leave this list as is, remove words, or add to it.
Filtered characters: If not filtered out, Word Clouds will include characters, so similar to filtered words, we have pre-filled a list of characters to filter out. This includes pretty much all characters found on a keyboard: punctuation marks, ampersands, backslashes, brackets, etc.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
Now that we've gone through setting up a Word Cloud it's time to talk about practicing. The Word Cloud takes some getting used to, so we recommend going live at least once, and then after your first broadcast go in and play around with the Word Cloud.
As mentioned above, the Word Cloud can be set to collect data retroactively. You can pull messages from the past. In our first example, we set it to collect data for some time in the future. But now, let's start the time frame in the past so we can actually see our Word Cloud populate and see how our settings affect it in real time.
As you can see in the video above, it took playing around with the settings in order to get some words into the Word Cloud. You may experience this as well. That's why it's a good idea to try it out outside of an event.
💡 Using Word Clouds after an event isn't a waste, Word Clouds make great shareable content for social media!
Just take the first step. Connect your platforms and see what your audience is vibing with!