TikTok drives and defines internet culture, so our goal on the platform was to build and reinforce Sesame Street’s cultural relevance. We wanted Sesame Street to be an integral part of our fans’ experience on the app—the videos they watch and engage with, the trends they follow, and even the content they create. To that end, we set out to not only maximize views, but to establish the highest average engagement rate on any owned channel, and inspire a strong body of user-generated content as well.
To meet our goals, we developed a content strategy that combined platform and audience insights to create videos that left a unique and memorable impact on viewers, inspiring them to both engage and create:
Tapping Into Nostalgia: Deep childhood memories drive some of our strongest connections with fans, so we dived into the archives to find classic scenes that would resonate with our top age demographics on TikTok, and harness the characters, songs, and recurring tropes they talk about most in their comments and fan content.
Authenticity: While it’s important to stay true to our brand, it’s just as essential to stay true to the TikTok platform and its community—we needed to show our fans that we know and love the app as much as they do. To do this, we held two dedicated video shoots to capture vertical videos especially for TikTok, tapping into popular trends, user behaviors, and subcommunities like #BookTok.
Original Sounds: We knew that fan videos could drive as much relevance on TikTok as our owned content, so we set out to inspire as much Sesame Street fan content as possible. We identified sound bites and clips that fans could relate to their own stories and experiences, along with original videos especially designed for fans to stitch and duet.
Thanks to these insights, our 2024 TikTok strategy yielded incredible results, exceeding our expectations for views, average engagement rate, and fan videos, and inspiring 25 articles covering our TikTok content.
