It’s that time again – RSA Conference! Anyone who’s anyone in the cybersecurity industry has been busy the past few months planning for next week’s show. As with any industry conference, there has been lots of pre-show buzz on social media. Using our social listening and monitoring platforms, we wanted to provide analysis of what the data is telling us about the conference so far.
If you’re heading to RSAC, here’s what you need to know:
It’s All About Visuals
As social media platforms keep evolving, one trend has remained consistent with all updates –emphasis on and preference for visual content. According to BuzzSumo, Facebook posts with images get an average of 2.3x more engagement than posts without images. Tweets with images receive an average of 150 percent more retweets than those without.
Taking a dive into the month before RSA Conference this year (March 2018) compared to the month before last year’s show (January 2017), there were 279 percent more images posted on social media in relation to RSA Conference. There was also a massive spike in video content, with only about 20 videos posted last year, and about 800 posted this year.
What does this mean for marketers? If visual assets aren’t a part of your RSAC social media strategy this year, you will have an even harder time standing out. With more than 13,000 social posts published about RSAC in March alone, the competition is fierce. Videos are an ideal way to capture your followers’ attention as they scroll through their feeds, which is likely filled with thousands of booth promotion posts for RSAC.
What’s #Trending?
In March 2018, some of the top trending hashtags around RSAC included #DevOps, #ArtificialIntelligence and #MachineLearning. Artificial intelligence and machine learning should be no surprise, as these topics have been trending in the media for some time now. It’s also not surprising to see DevOps, as we’re seeing the convergence of DevOps and security with the rise of DevSecOps.
In 2017, #ransomware was the highest trending industry topic around RSAC in the month before the show. The remaining hashtags were all related to RSAC promotions (i.e. #RSAC17) or general industry terms (i.e. #cybersecurity). This indicates that social content leading up to the show this year is more focused than in prior years, where posts consisted of mostly booth promotions and less industry context.
Quality Over Quantity
While there were thousands of RSAC-related social posts last month, PAN actually saw a decline in overall RSAC social posts compared to the month leading up to the 2017 show. In fact, there were about 10 percent fewer posts this year. While there are many factors that impact post volume, it seems as though security companies are focusing more on pushing out higher quality content, which can cause a drop in the overall quantity of posts. When you consider the time and effort it takes to create all the visual assets being incorporated into this year’s campaigns, it makes sense that there would be a drop in overall posting cadence across the board.
Rather than generic booth promotion posts, companies are providing more thought leadership content, industry commentary, and topic-specific posts to capture their followers’ attention and provide value rather noise into the discussion.
PAN will be analyzing social media data during and after the conference to see how these trends unfold and what new insights come to light. Stay tuned for the next blog post!
If you’re attending RSA Conference 2018 and want to learn more about how PAN can help you stand out, meet with a member of our team at the show.
