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Stephen Foskett

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Surprise! Facebook Shares Dramatically Improve Reach, Clicks, and Views

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been streaming video of our Tech Field Day presentations on Facebook Live in addition to our web site. All this time, we’ve been advising our presenting companies to share our Live video post to increase viewership. Although it’s obvious that this would increase viewership, we thought we would share some hard numbers to prove it.

More shares leads to more reach (X-Axis) and viewership (bubble size)

The bubble chart above shows what happens when companies share our Live event video posts: Reach and viewership dramatically improves. Our “baseline” is indicated as one share and colored gray. Additional shares uniformly increase reach and viewership. Our best-performing video posts had at least two additional shares, with that one purple bubble shared 8 times and generating over 600 video views.

Shares Generate Views

Over the last five events, our own posts sharing a Live Tech Field Day presentation video generated a median 623 “people reached” and 108 “video views”, according to Facebook. This is pretty strong, considering this is a single post to our Tech Field Day Facebook page. With 1,370 “follows” currently, this means that nearly half of our audience has each Live video added to their stream, and over 10% are watching at least some portion of it.

Each additional share generates about 525 more “reach” and 114 more “views”. In other words, a single share will likely double the views for a Live video post! Yet 12 of the 29 video posts included in this study were not shared by the companies presenting. But it’s not too late! This is “evergreen” content, and we have seen excellent viewership of these videos months and even years after the event. All it takes is a fresh share!

Clicks Require Shares

Interestingly, Facebook “clicks” seem to require post shares. This is logical, since a post share shows differently in the timeline, encouraging a click. But even page posts generate a few clicks: Our median click rate is 2.4 per Live video post.

What happens when a company, person, or page shares a Live video post? Median clicks went up by an amazing 25 per post, excluding our 2.4. This shows the impact of a shared post in a stream, with different behavior on the part of Facebook users.

Field Day in Facebook

We were skeptical about using Facebook for the enterprise IT content from Tech Field Day. But the viewership of our videos is incredibly strong. That’s why we added Facebook Live video to our page, and why we’ll continue working in Facebook to engage our Field Day audience.

This study includes 29 full presentations at five Field Day events in 2017. Overall, there were 5,753 video views and 26,796 “reach” for these posts.

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Tech Field Day Viewership Rockets Forward in 2015

Last year, we were thrilled to report that video viewership had reached 750,000 views over five years of Tech Field Day. This year we’re proud to report that we’ve more than doubled that number: In 2015 alone, Tech Field Day videos on YouTube and Vimeo were viewed more than 839,000 times! This brings total viewership to just under 1.6 million views in six years. And our live stream viewership is extremely strong as well, with over 10,000 different people tuning in live in the last six months of 2015.

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839,000 YouTube and Vimeo Views

Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!
Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!

When we started Tech Field Day, we thought the video recordings would mostly be a historical curiosity. But once we began posting them to YouTube in 2012, viewership really took off. Today, Tech Field Day sponsors are as excited about reaching our 5,000 YouTube channel subscribers as they are to talk tech with our delegate panel.

Overall, Tech Field Day has almost 1,400 videos online. Although we have a few videos with truly amazing viewership (Cisco and Dell both have videos with more than 20,000 views), our average viewership is very impressive at over 1,100 views per video on average.

The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market
The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market (click to enlarge)

We have always wanted to keep the Tech Field Day videos open and free to view, so we have resisted any kind of registration or tracking. But our presenters often wonder just who out there is watching all these videos. With that in mind, we ran the demographic reports from YouTube and were unsurprised: The vast majority of our viewers are men between 30 and 50 years of age, predominately in the United States but also in English-speaking countries like India, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

10,000 Livestream Viewers

In addition to posting our recorded video, Tech Field Day added live streaming video in 2013. Since we didn’t have a registration page, we didn’t have much visibility into these viewers until Livestream updated their system (and our account) at the middle of last year. Now that we have more data, we can share some interesting statistics in that area as well.

Overall, the six events we live streamed since July attracted 10,035 unique viewers, as measured by Livestream. The average viewer watched for about 30 minutes, but many stayed much longer than that. There were a solid 100+ viewers watching at any given time, with the core audience interacting on Twitter and commenting that they felt like they were there in the room with us.

Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)
Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)

Once again, our strongest country for live streaming video was the United States. Our English-speaking event certainly plays a part in that, but time zones are a major factor as well: It’s very difficult to tune in to an event that runs from 8 AM to 6 PM Pacific time when that’s the middle of the night where you live! Yet we still had non-trivial viewership from India, Australia, and Japan, with some of these folks saying they rearranged their schedules just to watch the event live.

Thank You For Watching!

In summary, video engagement with Tech Field Day has been off the charts, dramatically exceeding our expectations. If you’re one of the 10,000 people who watched live or the thousands who subscribe to the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, we would like to thank you. Our event is dedicated to sharing knowledge and expanding the community, and that’s exactly what’s happening! We have many more events planned for 2016, and we hope to see you there!

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Stephen Foskett Delivers Keynote at DeltaWare Data Solutions Emerging Technology Summit

As part of our growing public speaking practice, Foskett Services is pleased to announce that Stephen Foskett will be delivering a technical presentation and the closing keynote at the DeltaWare Data Solutions Emerging Technology Summit on November 10, 2015. We are looking forward to a great audience of tech-savvy end-users at the Summit.

Stephen Foskett presents the keynote at the Chicago VMUG UserCon on September 23, 2015
Stephen Foskett presents the keynote at the Chicago VMUG UserCon on September 23, 2015

Stephen Foskett’s two presentations at the Emerging Technology Summit are as follows:

  • Keynote: Out of the Lab and Into the Datacenter – Which Technologies Are Ready? Enterprise IT has long been a conservative field, with many promising technologies and products skipped in favor of a safer-seeming choice. But technology development continues at a rapid pace, and many IT professionals are seeing the need to transform IT or be left in the dust! In this keynote, datacenter expert Stephen Foskett will share his views on technology adoption: How to judge which products and technologies will sink and which will soar, and which trends are worth betting a career on.
  • Breakout: The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? What tradeoffs are made for economy and how do they affect the system as a whole? These questions can be puzzling, but there are core truths that are difficult to avoid. Mechanical disk drives can only move a certain amount of data. RAM caching can improve performance, but only until it runs out. I/O channels can be overwhelmed with data. And above all, a system must be smart to maximize the potential of these components. These are the four horsemen of storage system performance, and they cannot be denied.

The DeltaWare Data Solutions Emerging Technology Summit will be held in Edina, Minnesota on November 10, 2015. Attendance is free for qualified end users.

This keynote follows a very successful keynote at the Chicago VMware User Group UserCon in September. Foskett’s keynote at that event, “Gestalt IT – Why It’s Time to Stop Thinking In Terms of Silos”, was attended by over 500 IT professionals.

Photo by Eric Siebert

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Disappointed: Twitter Polls Don’t Degrade Nicely In Other Clients

Most people seem to have missed the news, but Twitter added in-tweet polling this month. This is an interesting new feature, and one of the biggest changes to the platform in years, but there’s a problem: When viewing a poll in one of the many not-yet-compatible clients, just the text of the question appears. There is no indication that a poll was attached, leading to some weird, out-of-context possibilities.

As you can see from this embedded tweet, Twitter’s polls are nicely composed when viewed on the web site. You are still limited to 140 characters (including the answers) but everything is neat and tidy. And once a logged-in user answers the poll, they can see the results immediately. After 24 hours, the poll is disabled and only the answers show.

For the historical record, here's how my Twitter poll looked on the Twitter web site after 15 hours online
For the historical record, here’s how my Twitter poll looked on the Twitter web site after 15 hours online

When services like Twitter add new features, it is best for them to “degrade” nicely for those using older or third-party clients. But this has never been the case for Twitter. When they added group direct messages, their existence was invisible outside new first-party clients. The same is true of longer-than-140 DM’s, and now this pattern has repeated with polls.

Here's how that same poll appears in the popular third-party client, Tweetbot. Note that there is no indication that I intended to tweet anything beyond the question.
Here’s how that same poll appears in the popular third-party client, Tweetbot. Note that there is no indication that I intended to tweet anything beyond the question.

In all three cases, it is disappointing that Twitter chose to hide critical content rather than showing it in an alternative way. And in all three cases a simple solution presents itself: Embed a link to the Twitter web site.

This would be especially-easy for polls, since the answers use up some of your 140 characters. Surely they could reserve enough space to include the link while still preserving the question! For example, my tweet could have read “What do you think of Twitter’s new polling feature? https://twitter.com/SFoskett/status/659865337630822400”.

Alternatively, they could simply replace the tweet with “@SFoskett has posted a Twitter poll: https://twitter.com/SFoskett/status/659865337630822400”, though this would be sub-optimal since the reader would have no idea if they wanted to click through or not. This solution would have been vastly preferable to showing nothing at all for group DM’s, however.

Here's how a Twitter poll looks on an official client (Twitter for Surface RT) that doesn't support polls
Here’s how a Twitter poll looks on an official client (Twitter for Surface RT) that doesn’t support polls. Still no dice.

Note too that we aren’t talking about rogue Twitter clients here. Tweetbot is authorized by Twitter (if grudgingly), and Twitter for Surface RT by Twitter, Inc. is surely a first-party client. It’s not that these clients are “non-supported” by Twitter, they’re simply “non-supporting” of this new feature.

With rumors swirling that Twitter will add longer-than-140 tweets in the near future, I am concerned. Of all the elegant solutions proposed, it seems that this Twitter, Inc. will likely choose one of the least-palatable options for non-supporting clients: Truncate them or simply don’t show them. This would be a terrible mistake.

Please, Twitter, allow your new features to degrade elegantly and usably in the future!

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Live Streaming Video Adds to the Tech Field Day Experience

Tech Field Day is a live, in-person event for the dozen delegates selected for each event, but as that term implies, a far greater number are represented. Indeed, our latest events have drawn a far-larger audience to the live video stream, and these viewers are joining the event via Twitter as well. This hybrid approach is unusual in the IT event world, and part of what makes Tech Field Day so special.

Storage Field Day 8 drew viewers from all over the world
Storage Field Day 8 drew viewers from all over the world, even beyond the English-speaking nations one would expect

Let’s look at the numbers for our recent Storage Field Day 8 event. Overall, 2,629 unique viewers tuned in over the three days of the event, October 21-23, 2015. Some of these are likely the same people using different computers or devices, but it’s safe to say that literally thousands of people were watching!

Our live stream was “on air” for 19 hours over the course of three days, but our viewers collectively spent 1,226 hours watching the event!

Although we have been suggesting that Tech Field Day events draw about 100 live viewers, this event exceeded that number by far. There was no “down hour” with less than 100 viewers, and some drew multiples of that number. It wouldn’t be fair to compare the statistics for each of the 10 companies presenting, but all should be happy with the live viewership of this event.

The Tech Field Day staff recognizes that tech talent and interest comes from all over the world, so we bring delegates from many nations to our events. Overall, about 1/3 of the Tech Field Day delegates come from outside the USA. Our livestream viewership similarly draws an international audience: 29.5% of viewers are outside the USA, with significant live viewership coming from Canada, European nations like Italy, the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as Israel, India, and Australia. Overall, live viewers in 49 countries tuned in for Storage Field Day 8.

Live streaming video is an important component of the Tech Field Day experience, to be sure. But it is only one of the many benefits of participating. Our recorded video viewership keeps climbing, with over 21,000 YouTube views that same week. We also recorded thousands of tweets, and are cataloging blog coverage on Facebook and Reddit. Learn more about Tech Field Day at our web site, and get involved!

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Storage Field Day 8 Brings the Enterprise Storage Industry Together

This week marks the largest Tech Field Day event ever. Storage Field Day 8 will see 10 companies, from hot new companies like Cohesity and Infinidat to industry stalwarts like Nimble Storage and Intel, present to our panel of independent delegates. These writers and speakers were brought from around the world to learn, discuss, and share insight with our presenters. Like all Tech Field Day events, Storage Field Day 8 will be broadcast live on the Internet for all to see.

SFD Logo

As implied by the name, this is the eighth Storage Field Day event produced by Foskett Services for Gestalt IT. With two focused events per year, this wraps our fourth year of Storage Field Day events and brings us close to the sixth year overall for Tech Field Day events.

In that time, Storage Field Day has seen the launch of exciting companies like Coho Data and Primary Data, who will both return for this event. We have also watched the development of Pure Storage, NexGen Storage, and Violin Memory, who have returned to the event frequently over the years.

Every Tech Field Day event features a delegate panel made up of of a dozen independent experts, and Storage Field Day 8 continues our tradition of mixing newcomers and familiar faces. Alex Galbraith and Josh De Jong are joining us for the first time, joining sophomore delegates Vipin V.K. and Jarett Kulm. This will be the third Tech Field Day event for Jon Klaus, Dan Frith, and Mark May. Rounding out the event are Field Day veterans, Ray Lucchesi, Enrico Signoretti, Scott D. Lowe, and Howard Marks.

Our delegates were selected by their peers through a process of nomination and voting. All were vetted on the basis of their technical expertise and storage focus and independent-mindedness. Becoming a Tech Field Day delegates is also a recognition for the contributions they have made to sharing their knowledge through social media and events. Most write popular blogs or contribute to industry publications, and many speak frequently at live or online events.

We invite the public to tune in for Storage Field Day 8 throughout the week. Live broadcasts will be hosted at the Tech Field Day web site and video will be shared on our YouTube channel. Those wishing to be part of the discussion can join in using the #SFD8 hashtag on Twitter.