What makes a successful TED Talk?
TED Talks have become the gold-standard when it comes to giving impactful presentations, but not all TED Talks are created equal.
Some talks have millions of views and get shared like rapid fire, while others don’t seem to catch or hold the attention of the viewers in the same way.
But, why?
Is it the topic?
The influentialness of the speaker?
How long the video has been online?
The Science of People, a human behavior research lab run by Vanessa Van Edwards, researched what it was exactly that makes some TED Talks catch attention and why others don’t. They had 760 volunteers rate hundreds of hours of TED Talks, evaluate, and report back on what impressions and patterns they saw.
While we suggest heading over to their site and checking out the research in-depth, we thought the tips were too good not to share with you today. We have created this quick infographic as an introduction to their fascinating findings.
Want to skip the infographic and go right to their article? See it here: “5 Secrets of a Successful TED Talk”
What makes a successful TED Talk?
5 main things that make a talk successful
1. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
TED talkers spend so much time and energy on what to say: the words, the script, the bullets. But, is how they say it more important? We found that there was no difference in ratings between people who watched talks on mute and people who watched talks with sound.
People liked the speakers just as much with sound as on mute.
2. Jazz hands rock
The more hand gestures, the more successful the talk. The bottom TED Talks had an average of 124,000 views and used an average of 272 hand gestures during the 18-minute talk. The top TED Talks had an average of 7,360,000 views and used an average of 465 hand gestures.
That’s almost double!
3. Scripts kill Your charisma
The more vocal variety a speaker had, the more views they had. Specifically, vocal variety increased the speaker’s charisma and credibility ratings. In other words, speakers who told stories, ad-libbed, or even yelled at the audience (like Jamie Oliver in his TED Talk), captivated the audience’s imagination and attention.
4. Smiling makes you look smarter
In our research, we found that the longer a TED speaker smiled the higher their perceived intelligence ratings were. Those who smiled at least for 14 seconds were rated higher in intelligence than those who smiled for less.
5. You have 7 seconds
According to our ratings, people had already made their first impression and decision about the entire talk in the first 7 seconds of the video.
The original article was published in 2015, by Science of People. See the full article here: “5 Secrets of a Successful TED Talk”
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