TED Talks: A Content Marketing Machine

(Photo: “My favorite TED Talk,” by flickr user Steve Jurvetson via Attribution 2.0 License)

As the TED conference series exemplifies, uploading videos is not enough to leverage an online content strategy. With recent trends of social emphasis on video content, we’ve already seen the importance of using video. However, while creating video content is a good starting point, it’s important to develop strategy from there. TED’s brand has nailed the content marketing game, leveraging the wealth of content it produces on a variety of different channels and a number of media. As the brand’s slogan says, “ideas worth spreading,” TED enhances its content strategy beyond the video in several key ways:

• Social engagement. TED takes the videos a step further by distributing them through social media channels. Look at TED’s Facebook page, for example. Multiple times per day, posts with links to videos and blog articles are pushed out in efforts connect the audience with content and pull them into the website. The social channels act as a long-running conversation about sharing and spreading ideas.
• TED-Ed. A whole separate website is devoted to offering resources and materials for educators to form lesson plans centered on the various topics explored in the videos. TED has found a way to package up the video content into useful educational tools.
• Blog. The TED blog provides another space to continue the conversation in a “Live from TED” series as well as a “News” section that offers different insights, or even a behind-the-scenes look at the conferences.
• Playlists. The TED website offers themed playlists that refurbish content into video lists. It categorizes related video content and makes it easy for users to discover more. Not to mention, this allows TED to maintain freshness and relevance with the users.
• Books. As if the online world wasn’t enough, TED has published several books that explore popular topics in the TED Talks. Each book has a companion TED Talk linked to the subject matter.

If you’re unfamiliar with TED Talks and are hungry for knowledge, watch two of the most viewed (and my personal favorites) “The Power of Vulnerability” and “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” These videos have received over 19 million and 24 million views, respectively. While these are just a sampling of the most viewed videos, they speak to the power that video format has become a favored medium for communicating information over the internet.