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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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750,000 Views Later, The Tech Field Day Audience Keeps Growing!

A few years back, we summarized the viewership of a few Tech Field Day events and were happy to report 90,000 video views. Now that 2014 is behind us, we wanted to revisit these numbers and see how things have changed. My, how we’ve grown!

Tech Field Day video viewership has grown steadily over the last four years
Tech Field Day video viewership has grown steadily over the last four years

Back in 2013, we recorded 90,000 views of the videos posted for the 14 full Tech Field Day events we had hosted through 2012. This number included both YouTube and Vimeo views but excluded non-presentation videos and other events. So 90,000 views was a very good number!

What a difference a few years makes. We actually had substantially more than 90,000 video views once we included all the different Tech Field Day content (including roundtable discussions, symposia, and interviews) and it has exploded since then. We went from 2,000 views in 2010 to 14,000 in 2011, 133,000 in 2012, and 238,000 in 2013. But 2014 was something else entirely, with 372,000 views that year alone, as much as all previous years put together!

Added up, that totals an amazing 759,399 video views for 2010 through 2014! It sure sounds like our Tech Field Day content is appreciated and enjoyed by the IT folks who follow us!

Of course, statistics are only worth so much. We used to not post the video recordings of our sessions, and we believe Tech Field Day would be worth doing even without the videos. It’s really about the technical community and the experience for our presenting companies and independent delegates. Sharing knowledge is the most important element of what we do, and the videos are just one aspect of that.

But it’s nice to know that three quarters of a million views go along with it!