Tech Events Are Getting Worse & Worse in Pakistan

I have been doing public speaking and attending events for 5 years now. But with time, events are becoming worse and worst.

The biggest reason I think of this is Instagram.

In my initial years of events, events were amazing. Crowds were big. The audience was both professionals and students. It used to be so diverse that I met a person working at GEO Network as video editor. I also met a government employee working who wanted to migrate abroad, few musicians, and many interesting tech personalities working at large local and international companies.

Wrong Audience

But then I started noticing the less number of professionals and more number of students. I know a friend of mine who wanted to join Devfest every year, and for 3 years his name was never shortlisted. And after 3 years, he stopped attending it altogether. He has worked in companies like Savior, Daraz etc. He wanted to get in speaking, and I advised him to attend a few before getting in speaking. And now that chapter is closed, sadly.

At first, I thought more students is a good choice from organizers' perspective. But when I get on stage, I realize that those are mostly 1-3 semester students. Most of these join events for some swag, a day out, and listening what's happening. Very few students engage with speakers and network with other people. That happens with professionals or senior students who have come to attend the event with an action plan to meet someone they are looking for, watch some session specifically they want to learn about etc.

I started to observe some kind of pattern and understand how audience is shortlisted. Every speaker attracts its own audience, and other is from the marketing.

Event Marketing

These days, tech events are being marketed on Instagram more than LinkedIn. When I started, Facebook was the choice. And I wanted it to replace with Meetup. We did organize one, and we hardly got 10 registrations while we have 500+ RSVPs on Facebook Event. And only 23 people showed up out of those 500 RSVPs. I always found RSVP as a useless feature (just like we say to friends “ham dekhenge” when someone is planning meetup).

And then, Facebook vanished from the scene and Instagram came. I never created a profile on IG because I am not a social media person. But guess why I ended up in IG? Because event organizers started forcing me to create one. Their excuse was “It makes it easier for marketing”. But interesting thing is I don't have any audience on IG. My audience is on LinkedIn. Still there are many people who overlap between the two, but my LinkedIn audience never knows about those events, but IG audience knows about them due to event marketing.

Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn

And this is the biggest reason I am holding responsible for poor quality of events. Event organizers are attracting the wrong audience. For a concert, you need IG people. But for a tech event, I don't think so. I admit that there's a big developer community on IG but it's not that active for tech or coding or development there. It's only to share coding memes. I know a developer advocate who built an audience of 13000 followers on Instagram by creating short form content about web development. When I asked him tips about how can I get started with Instagram, he said, "It's wrong audience. I should have put my energy on Twitter and LinkedIn instead".

Twitter was amazing in my career for android development until it became X and got ruined. Now, there's not much Android dev community there.

From what I understand, tech event organizers should market events on LinkedIn rather than Instagram if they want to attract a diverse audience, and make their events more engaging.

Filling them with 1st semester students on the last few days is not a great option. The main objective of events is not to fill the auditorium, rather it's about building a community and network to share and learn anything.

Let me know in the comments what you think about this. I would love to hear your thoughts on it.