With CES 2020 beginning today, we asked our data partner Shareablee to look at the technology influencers who were most active on social media during the past year, actually January 1, 2019, through November, 30, 2019. Shareablee provides the data exclusively to PRNEWS.
As a category, the tech influencers saw consumer engagement with their content grow 11 percent in 2019 vs. the same period in 2018.
Consumer engagement is shown in this chart as “actions.” Consumer actions represent the total of retweets, likes, comments and shares of the tech influencers’ content. For 2019, consumer actions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the tech influencer category reached 301.6 million actions, up from 272.7 million in 2018, says Herman Chen, marketing chief at Shareablee.
Total consumer actions on Twitter increased 33 percent, from 67.3 million actions in 2018 to 89.3 million in 2019. For Instagram, total consumer actions with the influencers’ content rose 7 percent, from 180.7 million in the 2018 period to 193.1 million last year.
Video totals jump
If you expected there would be a great deal of movement in the video space, you were correct.
The cross-platform total for video actions for tech influencers increased 49 percent year over year, with a 50 percent increase for Twitter video actions. For Instagram, the rise in consumer actions with videos was 67 percent in 2019 vs. the same period in 2018.
As we’ve seen in other categories, the company or influencer with the largest audience isn’t always the chart leader. Here, nobody in our top 10 can touch Bill Gates’s audience of 67 million, yet the Microsoft co-founder ranks fifth on this list.
Bigger is not better when it comes to posting content either. “Total content” on the chart is the number of posts and videos.
For example, Gates posted 441 pieces of content during the 11-month period, and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg posted just 17 times. Yet each piece of Zuckerberg’s content raked in 353,735 consumer actions on average. Gates’ posts pulled a respectable 12,075 consumer actions on average.
Chen brings up an interesting point: all three of the best-known names on the top 10 list went hurting in 2019. Total consumer actions across platforms were down 12 percent for Gates, 18 percent for Zuckerberg and 35 percent for the category leader, Elon Musk. It is unusual to see the leader in a category that gained consumer actions lose a significant amount and remain on top.
Incidentally, the fourth popular name on the list, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, had a resounding year. Consumer actions across platforms for his content rose a whopping 111 percent and engagement with his Twitter video content grew 12 percent year over year. Not surprisingly, Dorsey’s Oct. 30 bombshell that Twitter would no longer accept political advertising was his top post.
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