SlideShare Marketing: How to reach and engage professionals, generate leads and build your business with SlideShare.
One of my favorite new content marketing discoveries is SlideShare, the underappreciated content sharing platform owned by LinkedIn.
It’s actually more of a re-discovery, as I’ve been using the platform for years. However, with some new lead generation tools, measureable ROI (return on investment) for users, and a surge of interest from marketers, I’ve been dedicating more time and resources towards SlideShare over the past couple of months.
If you’ve never heard of SlideShare, think “YouTube for PowerPoint.” However, even if you don’t generally get up in front of a crowd or put on webinars, SlideShare is a powerful platform for reaching more of your ideal customers.
In this article I’ll show you why you need to be using SlideShare, and how to get the most out of it.
1. Reach More Prospects
SlideShare gets 60 million visits a month, and the numbers keep growing. With the current focus on “content marketing,” many marketers are looking for new platforms to reach and engage their audience, and SlideShare has a business focus they are interested in.
More than 400,000 new slide decks get uploaded each month, meaning there’s no sign of a slow down.
2. Get More Mileage from Your Presentations
If you are already creating slide decks for presentations or webinars, you can simply upload your PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare to reach a wider audience. Any notes in your decks get added to the notes section, saving more of your valuable time.
Pro Tip: If you’re like me, and prefer the superiority of Keynote over PowerPoint, you’ll want to convert your presentations to PowerPoint before uploading them. SlideShare unfortunately doesn’t take Keynote presentations in native format, and if you convert them to PDF to upload them, you’ll often lose clickable links within your presentation.
3. Get More Mileage from Other Content
Even if you don’t like presenting in front of a group, you can still benefit from SlideShare.
Take an old blog post (I like numbered lists) and convert them into slide decks and upload them to SlideShare. That’s what I did for Content Marketing: 13 Ideas for Writing Content Your Audience Wants to Read, a post that originally appeared on The Marketing Agents blog.
Pro Tip: If you’ve recently done some guest blogging, but they don’t allow you to post the article “as is” to your blog, you can convert it into a slide deck and post it to SlideShare instead.
4. Improve Your Online Visibility & Reputation
A robust profile on SlideShare adds to your online presence and credibility, and provides more content for people to build an opinion of your skills and expertise.
Plus, if anyone has anything negative to say about you, a SlideShare profile can help push that onto page two of the search results. (And if they do have something negative to say about you, send them to me. I have your back. 🙂 )
5. Make Blog Posts More Engaging with Embedded Slide Decks
Just like you might embed a YouTube video in a blog post, you can embed a SlideShare presentation in your blog posts or website articles.
Here’s an example of how it might look:
This adds an interactive element to your article and causes people to spend more time on that post. Since Google is measuring how long people spend on your site (or blog), this could very well be a metric that affects your overall ranking.
You don’t even need to use your own slide deck! If there’s an appropriate slide deck out there, you can embed someone else’s work.
6. Pimp Out Your LinkedIn Profile
You can easily add SlideShare presentations to enhance your LinkedIn profile and establish your credibility.
7. Deliver More Engaging Virtual Presentations
SlideShare allows you to sync an mp3 file to a slide deck—even one that’s already been uploaded—for more impact. You could record your presentation as an MP3 file and sync it to your slide deck so people can get your entire presentation, or set your slides to music to set a mood.
8. Give Your YouTube Videos More Reach
You can take any YouTube video—yours or someone else’s—and embed that video within a slide on your slide deck for a more engaging presentation.
This is another way of repurposing some of your content and making it go further. If you’ve created a series of related videos on YouTube, consider creating a “table of contents” slide deck where each video appears on its own slide.
9. Improve Your Search Engine Visibility
Recently I’ve seen an uptick of SlideShare hosted results in searches I’ve been doing. I’m not sure if this is a change in Google’s algorithm, a reflection of the rising importance of SlideShare, or I’m just more aware of presentations appearing in the results.
SlideShare results aren’t like images or videos, where they are treated and displayed differently than traditional results, so they don’t always stand out, so you may have seen some slide decks in your Google results without even realizing it.
10. Take Advantage of Mobile Users
I was beyond impressed when I clicked on a search result the other day that took me to a slide deck on SlideShare. The presentations filled the screen and the site felt more like a native app than a website.
Since more and more of your customers are going to be access information using a tablet or smart phone, SlideShare allows you to make your content mobile-friendly without any additional work on your end.
11. Host a Free Webcast
ZipCast, a free tool that’s part of the SlideShare suite, allows you to create free meetings on fly, inviting people to watch as you go through your presentation.
If you upgrade to SlideShare Pro you can keep these presentations private, only allowing specified people to access the presentations.
12. Generate More Leads
If you’re thinking about going Pro, here’s one more incentive: SlideShare offers “LeadShare,” a feature where you can embed lead generation forms right within your presentations.
LeadShare allows you to have the lead gen form appear at specific places within the slide deck or require people to fill out a contact form before downloading your presentation. In addition, if the deck is embedded on a website or blog, the lead gen form will appear there as well.
Now, even if you don’t upgrade to Pro, you can still include calls-to-action in your presentation as well as in the description that appears below your deck.
Pro Tip: The URLs you put in the description aren’t actually links, but links you put in your PowerPoint presentation are clickable and can send people to a lead gen form on your own website.
[slideshare id=11670397&doc=leadshare-120220004153-phpapp02]
13. Get Insights Into What Engages Your Audience
Understanding what your audience is looking for and finds valuable is invaluable to your business. Through the Analytics (available to Pro users) and Send Tracker, an email tracking tool, you can get insights into how people are engaging with your content.
Analytics will allow you to view company, location, referrers, search keywords and measure performance on Facebook and Twitter.
Send Trackers will allow you to track how people respond when you email them copies of your presentations, including opens and how much time they spent on each slide.
Takeaways
Slideshare is an undervalued tool for getting found, building trust and generating leads. Although B2B companies may find an easier fit here, non-profits and B2C companies are well represented.
As with any channel, you’ll want to spend some time optimizing your profile and then create and share content your ideal customer finds valuable.
Ultimately, whether through a Pro upgrade or through calls-to-action on a free account, you’ll want to get people to follow you back to your website or opt-in form for conversion.
Do you use SlideShare, or are you considering it now? How are you using it, or planning on using it? Let us know in the comments below!
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