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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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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!