Over 60 million visitors every month make SlideShare a social media dynamo. Learn how to use it to your advantage.
As one of the top 150 sites on the Internet, SlideShare may be one of the most underutilized resources for businesses to reach decision makers. Here are some additional statistics:
• Over 60 million visitors every month, 14 million registered users(18)
• Has five times more traffic from business owners than other popular websites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter(19)
• SlideShare was recently voted amongst the World's Top 10 tools for education & eLearning(20)
As it sounds, SlideShare.net is a slide (think PowerPoint and Keynote) sharing site. It also allows document and video sharing. SlideShare has free and "pro" accounts. The "pro" accounts are reasonably priced and allow owners to brand the page, remove ads and receive leads (people who view or download the slides).
Use Case
I tried SlideShare a few years ago, uploading presentations from a user conference. In one week we had over 4,000 views. Months later we added "lead tracking" and started receiving between 100 and 300 "leads" per month. I put "leads" in quotes because there is no qualification on these contacts other than they showed some interest in the topic. But even with that limitation, you have a group who is self-selecting and can be put into a marketing funnel for more qualification.
Here is our suggestion for getting started with SlideShare:
1. Invest some time looking around SlideShare. Look at your competitors and search on your keywords. Tip—after you get the results from an initial search, SlideShare will give you the option to filter results and search for users.
2. Set up a test account for experimentation.
3. Pay to upgrade to a branded "pro" account and brand it. Slide-Share allows you to select a background image. Also fill in all the profile information.
4. Prepare presentations for uploading. SlideShare grabs all the text on the presentation slides AND the notes and puts them in a transcript that shows up after the comments. Unless your notes are for public consumption, remove them or upload as PDF. Make sure you have a call to action in your slides. We end every slide set with a short URL to a landing page or a blog related to the topic. Also consider having Twitter, Facebook, or other account information on the ending slides.
5. Upload the presentation.
6. Fill in metadata; this is very important. Both SlideShare and search engines index the presentations. Your description and tags should be SEO rich. Also select the appropriate category.
7. Manage tags across presentations. Use a common term in the tags for presentations you want grouped together. SlideShare allows you to group presentations in boxes based on tags. We create event tags to group all the presentations given at an event or by a topic. Even if you don't use the box feature, a user can click on any tag and get a list of presentations containing that tag.
Viewers will only have the slide contents to get your message, unless you have put in notes. Another feature of SlideShare is called Slidecast that allows you to play any slide deck synchronized with an audio file you upload. This allows you to provide both the visuals and the explanation to your viewers.
SlideShare is a very effective way to get an audience for presentations, documents, and videos.
18. http://bit.ly/b2bmkt-1911
© 2012 Michael Procopio
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