SlideShare |
SlideShare is web site portal with a social community element established to facilitate the sharing of power point presentations and most recently, even other types of documents and video content. It’s a business to business social media site that can drive high quality traffic back to any site via an embedded power point presentation.
Any visitor can easily find power point presentations on just about any topic of interest, with social sharing features, including tagging presentations, embedding SlideShare content with a LinkedIn account and Facebook integration.
SlideShare launched in late 2006, and today boasts 16 million registered users with more than 58 million monthly unique visitors and over 9 million presentations uploaded, which is growing daily. It’s one of the top 150 web sites and 3 Billion slides are viewed each month. Competitors include Scribd.com and Docstoc – which can each drive significant traffic for your business; but, to date, not at the level of SlideShare.
SlideShare is now owned by LinkedIn, the high-growth B2B focused social media platform – moving forward, expect tighter integration with LinkedIn.
Think of SlideShare as an extremely valuable content marketing platform for your brand or business. According to ComScore, SlideShare has five times more traffic from business owners than other popular social media sites including Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter.
Repurpose Your Existing Content – most businesses have a good number of power point presentations that have been used for other marketing purposes. Create a SlideShare account (takes about 10-15 minutes, including email confirmation) and upload any presentations, as long as there is no confidential information in them. Note: remember you can upload videos and other docs and share these as well.
Keep Your Presentation Simple – don’t upload 50-75 slides, keep the number of uploaded slides to something manageable; i.e. 20-30 slides at most. SlideShare marketing is most powerful when you remember “less is more” – you want to pique the visitor’s interest and drive them to a web site or social media profile.
Keyword Optimize you Presentation – SlideShare utilizes an internal search engine, which is how visitors will find your presentations. And, these presentations are archived and indexed by Google and other top tier search engines, driving incremental traffic to your web site. Use descriptive titles that are at a minimum of 3-5 words or more and be descriptive.
Incorporate Clickable Links – you can embed clickable links in your actual presentation that can link to your web site, Twitter profile, etc. These will drive traffic on an ongoing basis.
Embed Aggressively – you can embed your SlideShare Marketing presentation via your Blog, website and/or just about any online profile. If you are doing a blog post on a specific topic, embedding a SlideShare presentation will add credibility to your blog post and drive conversions.
Connect your LinkedIn Account – LinkedIn (now the owners of SlideShare) has an application that enables you to connect your SlideShare marketing presentation to your LinkedIn account – take advantage of this. Each time you upload a new SlideShare presentation your LinkedIn account is updated automatically and you can show multiple presentations via your LinkedIn profile.
Understand your SlideShare Statistics – check your SlideShare statistics (views, comments and shares), as these underscore the value of your content, or not, if no interaction or engagement.
Upgrade to Pro Account – if you are serious about generating marketing ROI via SlideShare marketing then upgrade your account to a Pro Status (we list the costs below). You also get much better analytics and the ability to allow viewers to contact you via a presentation with an integrated button and improved branding capabilities via account customization. But, before you consider going with a Pro account, get a good feel for the platform first.
Understand the Competition – like any social media platform, SlideShare enables you to look at an unlimited number of competitor’s presentations, profiles, content, etc. This is common – know that your SlideShare marketing presentations are being accessed and reviewed by your competitors.
SlideShare Marketing offers four pricing tiers:
Basic. This account is free, and lets you upload files of up to 100 megabytes. There are no private meetings, no private uploads, no analytics, no branding, and no video uploads. You do get basic stats with this account.
Silver. For $19 per month, options start to open up. You get 300 MB of file size, analytics, private meetings, 10 videos per month, 30 leads per month without geo targeting, basic controls and basic branding.
Gold. At $50 per month, you get everything in the silver package but your videos go up to 20 per month, you get 75 leads per month with geo targeting, controls include more advanced options, and you have expanded branding options.
Platinum. $249. per month; the highest level allows you the same as gold and silver plus unlimited video uploads and leads with custom questions, full controls, and full branding.
As the closest competitors, Scribd.com and Docstoc offer a much different feature set, it’s difficult to compare pricing. To purchase the features and capabilities offered by SlideShare via smaller, independent applications would certainly cost more, and wouldn’t give you the kinds of opportunities for lead generation that you’ll find with SlideShare marketing.
The account setup and user interface are well done – expect to spend an hour or two (on average) creating an account and uploading your first presentation.
It’s a great content marketing platform that will drive search engine rankings.
Good site for any business that wants to promote itself and drive leads via other business minded executives.
It’s unique in what it offers in terms of a the combination of platform and lead generation
Social media integration allows you to leverage your other marketing assets to help generate leads, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Note: we highly recommend integrating a SlideShare account with LinkedIn and vica versa.
A few downsides:
Using flash means the inability to reach out to iOS devices, although SlideShare for Android is possible.
The free version has tremendously limited functionality, making it hard to get a feel for how the app really works.
SlideShare converts presentations to Flash, so slide transitions don’t always work well.
We think the Platinum pricing is a bit steep and the paid accounts should be broken into just three pricing tiers.
SlideShare Marketing is a great way to drive leads, traffic and greater visibility for your business. We give SlideShare 9 out of 10 stars!