It may surprise you that an event billed as an all-digital-#CES2021, as opposed to the equivalent in-person trade show the year before, should have 50% less traction on social media, yet that is exactly what our sister site aka.tv has reported over the last 30 day period [1].
As you can see from the figures below, all of the numbers are significantly down on the previous year.
| Twitter Last 30 Days | #CES2021 [1] | #CES2020 [2] |
| No. of Tweets: | 319,831 | 710,321 |
| No. of Twitter impressions: | 7,210,037,759 | 18,202,952,967 |
| No. of Twitter users who tweeted: | 71,668 | 268,864 |
| No. of Twitter users reached: | 662,317,021 | 1,436,877,785 |
Of note, is that an in-person #CES2020 attendance of 170,000 people encouraged 268,864 people to tweet, whereas a 100% virtual #CES2021 audience (whatever the ‘real’ attendance was [3]) saw only 71,668 people tweeting.
We feel that that this is probably due to a number of factors; for example: –
- Fewer people will in fact bother engaging with an online event vs actually being physically present. If you’ve gone to the effort of going to Las Vegas, you aren’t going to just not bother to engage with all that is around you. If you’ve signed up online with every intention to attend, it’s much easier not to because, for instance, the cat gets sick and you take it to the vet or you have home-schooling problems, or heaven forbid, ‘proper work’ gets in the way, etc.
- Selfies/shiny things photos. There’s much more visually to see and engage with, so you would take photos of yourself, things, and meeting people and tweet them/talk about them, probably in multiple posts. That’s not so likely when you can look at something/someone on a screen only. Sure, you may still tweet about it, but probably just once or twice (if that).
- Even if as many ‘attended’ a digital show compared to a physical one, there’s still likely to be less twitter because of the reasons above.
- Networking: as well as shiny things to see, there are people to meet and network with, much easier to mingle at an event (eg. a Showstoppers, etc) or press conference, or on the show floor than it is to arrange virtual meetings. You can just bump into people or not in a physical situation, and decide instantly if you want to engage with them, whereas it all needs detailed planning online. For many, that’s too much of a hurdle to overcome.
To us, this simply reinforces that there’s no escaping that virtual events can only go so far, and that there’s no point trying to spin that they are in anyway equivalent. The obvious test is that, if there wasn’t a global health crisis, no-one would be seriously thinking of having virtual events instead of the real thing.
Remember, like most things when we try to make them a digital remote substitute, it is only a substitute. There’s no point in pretending that can possibly match or be equivalent to the physical experiences that we are used to. Virtual events can only address sight and sound (even then a much poorer sound experience), but none of the other human senses.
These figures do not also need to be seen in isolation, looking at the example of #Infocomm20, last year’s twitter traffic was roughly a third compared to the in-person 2019 – that’s in a quite similar ballpark to what we see here.