Are you using SlideShare yet? You probably should jump on that.
SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing PowerPoint presentations, infographics, PDFs, recorded webinars, and other professional content. Quick facts from the SlideShare site:
- SlideShare was founded in October 2006 and acquired by LinkedIn in May 2012
- In Q4 of 2013, the site averaged 60 million unique visitors a month and 215 million page views
- SlideShare is among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world
Despite these impressive numbers, many (if not most!) businesses are still ignoring the community, which means they are leaving a great content marketing opportunity on the table. If you already create well-designed, thoughtful content, this is one more way to support your other tactics with minimal additional effort. I have collected a few tips to get you started:
Your headline and your cover image matter – The Content Marketing Institute points out that the SlideShare home page is a sea of headlines and thumbnails. Choose wisely to be enticing! Also – remember that the site was designed primarily to share PPT slides, so it is best to think in landscape, not portrait.
Be funny, useful, and/or inspiring – Alicia Lawrence recommends using humor, statistics, or quotes to increase your views on SlideShare. According to her research, almost 90% of the presentations she viewed used at least one of these tactics. This was particularly true for the posts with over one million views.
Include a clickable link in your call-to-action – Don’t miss an opportunity to send someone to your website or to collect an email address. Make sure you build a clear call-to-action into your presentation with a clickable link.
Remember to use LinkedIn and SlideShare together! – Inbound.org reminds us that LinkedIn owns SlideShare, and the two communities build off of each other well. Increase your visibility on both sites by uploading content to SlideShare and then promoting it as part of your LinkedIn outreach.
Use content that you already have – I bet you spent a lot of time creating a fantastic slide deck for your sales webinar last week. What did you do with the PPT when you were done? Review it, cut out any extra jargon or sales content, and add a call-to-action. It would probably make a great presentation for SlideShare. Did your executives speak at any trade shows this year? How are you reusing their slides? Share them!
Do you have a SlideShare tip or success story? I would love to hear it!
Oh, and of course, I couldn’t end the post without an infographic:
The Stay Engaged Experiment 
Love the post! I actually didn’t know you could add clickable links to SlideShare presentations. I have always been frustrated by that, so when I read here that you suggested it, I did some Googling to figure out how. Just in case anyone else is interested, the answer is here: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-create-clickable-links-in-slideshares
Although, I’m still fairly certain you can’t add clickable links to the description text (or am I wrong about that too?), which is very odd/annoying.
LikeLike
Thanks for sharing the link! I’m honestly not sure about the description text. Anyone else know?
LikeLike
Thanks for mentioning my article on BuzzSumo, Rachel! Regarding clickable links and Sarah’s comment above (just thought I’d share): I’ve never been able to get a link in the description text or transcription (SlideShare probably does that for SEO reasons). Also, you have to wait till slide 4 before you can embed a link into your slide.
LikeLike
Your piece was great. Thanks so much for the input!
LikeLike