SlideShare: "The Quiet Giant of Content Marketing"

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SlideShare is the world’s largest content community for sharing presentations. The network was founded in 2006 by Rashmi Sinha, and in 2012, the network was acquired by LinkedIn for $119 million. Since SlideShare's launch and integration with LinkedIn, the mobile-friendly network has exponentially grown. According to the SlideShare website, 60 million people visit the site monthly. With 130 million page views per month, SlideShare is among the top 200 most visited sites in the world. 

SlideShare targets users from professional and educational communities, who regularly leave comments, add favorites and download content from the network. Besides hosting presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. Businesses can upload documents to SlideShare to share ideas, conduct research, connect with others and generate leads.

SlideShare has many capabilities including:

• Upload presentations publicly or privately
• Download presentations on any topic
• Embed presentations on blogs or websites
• Share presentations on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
• Embed YouTube videos into your presentations
• Sync MP3 audio with slides to create a webinar
• Free, one click web meetings
• Generates business leads

How to use SlideShare

Allison Friedman created eight tips to help businesses use SlideShare more effectively.

1. Use existing content, but trim fat as necessary

      You can upload all of your old business presentations, but
      be sure you’re formatting them to be successful on
      SlideShare. Add images to slides where they're
      appropriate, and cut out any wordiness. According to
      Gregory Clotti, the most effective SlideShare 
      presentations get right to the point because web users
      prefer quick, and information-packed sentences, images and graphics.

2. Keep your content simple, but visually interesting

Where possible, try to tell your business’ story through images or videos, as opposed to text. In a world with so much online content available, images help your content get noticed, and they help drive engagement. Put the most design work into your title slide because it serves as an advertisement for your content.

3. Enable embedding

If you allow anyone to download your presentations, you exponentially expand the reach of your presentation. If you embed your SlideShare presentations onto your company website, you preserve your company’s bandwidth, and you make it easier for your visitors because they won’t have to open another application to view your content.

4. Optimize your presentations for search

SlideShare content ranks well in external search engines, so it’s important to include keywords in titles, descriptions and tags so traffic is driven to your content.

5. Add hyperlinks to your presentations

Include links to your company’s website on the first and last slides of your presentation, so people who enjoyed your presentation can learn more about your company.

6. Integrate your SlideShare, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts

Adding the SlideShare app on Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to automatically display your most recent presentation on each of the social networks. The app sends a notification to your entire network, so they’re aware that there is new content to view.

7. Take advantage of SlideShare analytics

By reviewing how many people view, comment on and share your presentations, you will know what your target audience responds to.

8. Invest in SlideShare Pro if you want leads

If you upgrade your SlideShare account to SlideShare Pro, you can get insight on who’s viewing your presentations. This knowledge can lead to new partners and customers.

Why your company should be using SlideShare

Hundreds of companies aren't taking advantage of the network that has been nicknamed "The Quiet Giant of Content Marketing." Most companies are already creating great content, and SlideShare allows your content to be seen visually, and by a larger audience. Christina Milanowski elaborated on six reasons your company should be using SlideShare.

     1. Increase SEO

     From the link on your website, to the links embedded within you presentations, SlideShare
     generates a lot of referral traffic. Creating a presentation in SlideShare and adding keywords
     gives your company a robust result in searches.

     2. Appear as an industry expert
  
     To leverage content from speeches and make your employees appear as go-to-experts, post    
     presentations with appropriate keywords on SlideShare. You'll increase traffic to your homepage
     and you can easily share the speeches with SlideShare.

     3. Promote your content marketing strategy
  
     Infuse SlideShare into your content marketing strategy to help publish and promote the content
     that you're already sharing via articles, white papers, blog posts and downloadable content. It will
     direct new traffic and leads to your company.

     4. Maximize your LinkedIn potential
  
     LinkedIn allows your to display your SlideShare content in full color, which will draw more
     connections to your company's page and website.

     5. Use it as a search tool

     SlideShare is one of the best
     resources in terms of pure content.
     Search the network on a
     particular topic and you'll receive a
     list of content from great minds
     across the world.

     6. It's highly measurable

     SlideShare allows you to gauge the
     influence of your content by tracking
     how your presentations are
     performing on Facebook, Twitter,
     LinkedIn, Google Plus and
     Pinterest. You can also gauge
     how much traffic your website is
     receiving from SlideShare.

Want more information about how SlideShare can benefit your business? Check out this presentation!