A TEDx Linkedin Strategy To Diffuse Talks

By Bilyana Georgieva, TEDx Coach, Digital Nerd and Multi-Award Winning Professional Speaker, founder of The 'Red Dot Speaker Star' (formerly 'Soon-To-Be a TEDx Speaker') Program.

The 'Red Dot Speaker Star' newsletter gives you tips, tricks and hacks for your successful TEDx Journey. Make sure you follow me on LinkedIn and click the????button on my profile to be notified when I share them.

Have you ever wonder what's the best strategy to grab attention on LinkedIn and diffuse your TEDx talk to an audience beyond your own connections and followers?

You don't want to sound like the usual

'WOW, my TEDx talk is now published .. Watch it here'

Those posts don't work anymore. There are too many TEDx speakers doing it and most of the people just pass such 'Yet another one' posts

You know that just one post announcing your TEDx talk is not enough but how can your second, third, fourth .. posts keep driving traffic towards your TEDx talk?

There have to be as many posts as possible, right?

Firstly, because you want your views to increase every day, and

Secondly, because you want your visibility on social media to unlock all the opportunities available out there - be invited to speak on other stages, be a guest on your dream podcast, TV or radio show .. One of my clients was invited for a director's interview of a well known mental health organisation, thank to his TEDx talk.

Opportunities are endless, once you get that worldwide visibility.

But that's not going to happen automatically, just because you now have a TEDx talk. You have to create and execute smart strategies to diffuse your TEDx talk and gain that visibility

Today, I want to share one of my 36 strategies I use for my TEDx mentees when it comes to diffusing their TEDx talks on social media. The full strategy includes also Facebook and Instagram, however, to simplify it here, I will only give you the strategy, actions and results' stats for LinkedIn only.

From experience the success of my mentees' high visibility on LinkedIn come from these 5 super important rules:

1. Post for 2 weeks, every day, starting from the day your TEDx talk is published
2. All 14 posts must always look different, sound different and technically be different! I explain below what that means
3. Always share your YouTube link, not the ted.com link. Check out here WHY
4. Always post in the morning, between 7 am and 9 am your local time.
5. Every post has to have different hashtags. As the LinkedIn recommendation in 2022 is to use maximum 3 hashtags, that makes it (3x14) 42 hashtags in total. When choosing your hashtags think about your topic in general, the stories your told on stage, key words you used, all different personalities of your audience and their interests, any national holidays or international celebrations on the days you post.

The variety of hashtags is a KEY factor that brings success, as this way you include very diverse audience - your goal Nr 1 for your Diffuse strategy.

I call it

Inclusivity goal of very exclusive TEDx content

OK, I said that all 14 posts must always look different, sound different and technically be different!

???? You must use different formats to make each post looks visually different

???? Some should be a story telling, using part of your script; some to be with more statistics and metrics; some to be pure fun and entertainment. Take different avatars from your audience?and talk to them as you would do over a cup of tea. As much as the Call To Action at the end of each post will always be

'Watch my TEDx talk here <URL LINK to your TEDx on YouTube>'

you want the entire text in the copy of the post to sound different so people who follow you and read your posts every day don't get bored with the same information. Don't brag about the same! Have fun and create fun for your audience

???? Last but not least, LinkedIn loves variety in your posts from a technical perspective, hence I've created:

Three pillars for your LinkedIn TEDx posts:

1. How you share the TEDx YouTube URL link
2. What kind of visuals you use
3. Using long, medium or short text in the copy of your posts

How can you share the TEDx YouTube URL link?

I use 3 different ways to share the TEDx link:

1. A direct share from YouTube into LinkedIn
2. Adding the URL link in the copy of the post, as part of the text
3. Putting the URL link in the first comment, once you publish your post

I explained step by step how to do each of those steps in my previous article "The best way to share YouTube video on LinkedIn and increase your views"

What kind of visuals you can use?

There are 6 type of visuals available at this moment on LinkedIn:

1. When a video URL link is in the copy of the post LinkedIn automatically use the thumbnail picture of the video.
2. If you first upload your own picture and you still have the URL link in the copy, the picture will overwrite the thumbnail so your visuals will be what you've uploaded manually. I use branded or not branded pictures of my clients. Since beginning of 2022 not branded pictures that look more natural have much higher engagement and views.
3. It is exactly the same for pdf documents (carousels), where the document overwrites the thumbnail of the video and turns into a visual for the post. In the stats below you will notice that I haven't used carousels for this specific TEDx talk and strategy as, frankly, we didn't have time to prepare any. However do have it in your list and use it as they get loads of engagement.
4. Direct upload of a 30 seconds video excerpt from the TEDx video. Make sure you've got subtitles on the video as well
5. 'Celebrate occasion' is the 5th option when you go to create a new post on LinkedIn. You've got different variations in here but for TEDx talks we tested 'Project Launch' and worked really well. It comes with 6 variations of animated pictures as well, which makes it again visually different from all other posts of your TEDx talk
6. Text only. Could be a short, long or medium length. Although there are no any visuals here those type of posts perform really well, so don't underestimate them

Now, as you've got 3 variations of the URL Link share, 6 visuals, and 3 variations for the text, what's left is to make combinations between them.

Here are the results of a client's TEDx talk. For NDA purposes I will not mention the name of the person and the talk, however I will only add that the stats below are similar to other 4 client's results. As I've got now steady and similar results I know this LinkedIn strategy works a magic!

Have fun with the combinations!

Although you see that some posts perform below the average performance, compared to posts done before the TEDx talk's posts, that can be easily fixed with different style of a copy, better hashtags combinations, or different selection of a topic for each weekday.

For example, I noticed that Mondays all my clients that are coaches have the least engagement on their posts, where Saturdays and Sundays were great for polls and personal stories with personal pictures as visuals.

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Sending you love and energy!

Yours,

Bilyana