94.6% of Event Attendees Post — Estimates Change at Around the 10-Person Mark

Let's start with the conclusion. Influencers who attend an event post about it almost without exception. But that's only true when the event is "small" — once the number of people cast grows, some who don't post start to appear. In our track record, limited to projects where we can trace whether every single attendee posted or not (37 projects, 390 people), the overall posting rate was 94.6%. In this article, we take a closer look at what's inside that number — in other words, what changes depending on scale.

Note that all aggregate figures discussed in this article are anonymized group statistics and do not indicate any specific brand, project, or individual.

Why We're Publishing This Perspective

"If you invite them to an event, the post will basically follow." This is the sense we get day to day from our projects. Combined with the 91% posting rate for gifting initiatives reported in our inaugural article, it's a figure that can easily lead to the understanding that "as long as attendance happens, the post will almost always follow" — and stop there.

However, as we looked back over our projects, what became clear is that this sense of "it almost always follows" doesn't hold with the same strength regardless of project size. A lineup of a few people and a lineup of dozens of people present genuinely different pictures in terms of how certain a post actually is. This difference has often been discussed vaguely as "large projects come with their own kind of difficulty," but rarely put into numbers. This time, we confirm it in numbers, using our own track record.

Posting Rates by Scale

We divided the 37 projects and 390 people for which we can trace every attendee's posting status from our records, grouping them by the size of the cast.

Adding up the projects with fewer than 10 people cast, all 109 out of 109 attendees posted — not a single case of a non-post. Zero exceptions. On the other hand, adding up the projects with 10 or more people cast, only 260 out of 281 (92.5%) posted. All 21 people who didn't post this time came from these "10 or more" projects. Not a single non-poster came from the projects with fewer than 10 people.

If the overall figure of 94.6% applied with the same strength regardless of scale, the probability of all 109 people in the under-10 projects posting without exception would be less than 1 in 200. This is a difference that's hard to explain away as ordinary, everyday variation.

It should also be noted that this 94.6% figure isn't the result of cherry-picking a convenient way to slice the data. Even if we don't limit the scope to projects where every attendee's posting status can be traced, and instead broaden it to projects where records are reasonably complete, the rate is 95.9%; and looking at everyone whose posting status could be determined at all, it's 96.5% — neither moves far from 94.6%. The fact that the number stays in a similar range regardless of how we cut the data suggests it has a certain degree of robustness.

This Is Not a Story of "Headcount Being the Cause"

Looking at the numbers so far, you might be tempted to read this as "increasing headcount lowers the posting rate." But to be honest, this data doesn't support going that far.

That's because large-scale projects are likely to differ from small-scale ones in the very nature of their lineup to begin with. Factors other than headcount may be shifting at the same time — for example, large projects tend to involve blanket outreach, and they're more likely to include people with whom the relationship is less established. This data doesn't allow us to isolate headcount as a single variable and declare it "the cause." What we can say is only an observation: "the larger the project, the more non-posters appear."

One more point, to avoid misunderstanding: there are only 6 projects with 20 or more people cast, but 3 of them maintained a 100% posting rate. It's not that large-scale projects uniformly break down — rather, more precisely, the downturns are concentrated in a subset of projects. This is not a story of "large headcount always means the posting rate drops."

How This Differs From Our Inaugural Article

The 91% posting rate for gifting initiatives reported in our inaugural article and this time's 94.6% may look like similar numbers on the surface. But what each is actually asking is different. The inaugural article confirmed a single behavioral rate: "does what's sent get posted about?" What has come into view this time is a different question: how reliable is the very sense that "attendees almost always post," and to what extent does that reliability hold up depending on scale? We'd encourage you to read this time's numbers not as a repeat of the same conclusion, but as something visible only once you add the new axis of scale.

What We Keep in Mind When Designing a Lineup

From here on, we want to be upfront that what follows is not backed by numerical data — it reflects thinking based on hands-on experience in the field.

In lineups with a larger number of people cast, we work on the premise that the depth of relationship with each individual attendee is likely to vary, and we make a point of building thicker individual follow-up systems in advance. The more a lineup tends toward blanket outreach, the more room there is to spell out the request details and the purpose of the day even more carefully before sending it out.

Also, it's an unavoidable structural reality that as headcount increases, contact and on-the-day communication with each individual person tends to thin out. That's precisely why, for larger-scale lineups, we believe there's room to strengthen operations — for example, deciding in advance who will be responsible for following up with whom, and making sure there's at least one individual touchpoint between the day of the event and the time of posting. Given that some projects with 20 or more people have actually maintained 100%, we try not to settle for "some downturn is unavoidable given the large headcount," and instead aim for a lineup design that doesn't use scale itself as an excuse — the larger the project, the more this matters.

Closing Thoughts

As scale grows, things that were a given in small projects start to no longer be a given in some projects. Looking back at this time's numbers, we feel that what's being tested is whether we notice that shift and can redesign the lineup accordingly. Rather than settling for "it can't be helped because there are a lot of people," revisiting the room for design that fits the scale — that's what should lead to greater precision in the next lineup.

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Source: STATS INC. research (based on the results of our own event initiatives, limited to projects where every attendee's posting status could be determined from records). The figures cited are from previously verified aggregate records, statistically processed so that no individual project, brand, or time period can be identified.