With so many new online technologies, do you ever wonder which ones are worth focusing your attention on?
If you believe “success leaves clues,” we’ve picked up one crumb trail worth following – and it leads us straight to SlideShare.
And I’m here to tell you why SlideShare is a mighty weapon in the arsenal of any content marketer… that you should definitely be using for your business.
Ok, first a quick overview:
SlideShare is “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations.” This means PowerPoint style slideshows, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars – all hosted through SlideShare – that can be shared publicly or privately.
While that’s the gist of their service, that description barely scratches the surface of SlideShare’s capability (and power as a marketing tool). Want to make podcasts? Add audio to your slideshows? Put YouTube videos in your presentations? Embed your presentations around the web?
ALL of that is readily available, and that’s still just the surface. Outside of all the “face value” kind of features, though, there’s a lot going on behind those functions that are HUGE for your marketing presence.
Let’s dive in:
1. Connection With Other Users
SlideShare has around 60 Million monthly visitors, and represents a larger professional network than LinkedIn…
Not only does this mean that there are TONS of resources for you to learn from (from connecting with others in your industry to viewing, downloading, and remixing other people’s public presentations), it’s also a massive audience for B2B marketing…
Most of the people using SlideShare are entrepreneurs, business owners, or at least the movers and shakers of their respective companies – and that translates to a huge pool of qualified prospects for your B2B efforts.
There aren’t really any other platforms with this kind of built-in professional audience, and since the whole site is geared toward this type of user, informative, professional content tends to get the most traffic too!
2. Driving Engagement With Data
According to a HubSpot study, longer slideshows actually get more views on SlideShare, and this indicates that people are hungry for detailed, content-driven data…
The average SlideShare viewer has a longer attention span than say, a YouTube visitor or Facebook scroller, and is generally visiting the site (or viewing a presentation in a different location) because they are genuinely interested in the information.
Stacking your presentations with chart and graphs, testimonials, and other striking, visual data adds credibility to your company, helps establish you (the presenter) as an expert in your industry, and can prompt people to follow up to learn even more (with the click-through links you provide in your presentation, of course).
And because you can combine, split, and remix presentations with SlideShare, you have an opportunity to break presentations into more digestible portions, and even split test different versions!
This is a heavy-duty tool for presenting all that data – to an audience who is already primed to appreciate it…
3. Credibility and SEO Boost
As I mentioned near the beginning, SlideShare’s audience is HUGE. They receive 130 million page views a month… placing them among the 200 most visited websites in the entire world!
With that kind of traffic, simply having your content in the mix makes your company part of a highly regarded (and highly visible) network of information.
The SlideShare website was also built with SEO in mind, automatically crawling and transcribing your presentations, and giving you some presence on one of the most popular websites on the planet… and this traffic can driven back to your website.
SlideShare presentations show up in organic Google results, brining in even more traffic… and if all that wasn’t awesome enough – they even have some built in lead capture functions to boot!
And we’re just scratching the surface.
Once you start using it, you’ll see even more benefits from connecting with other professionals, learning from other people’s presentations, driving interested prospects to your website…
From tech giants like Cisco and IBM to solo-preneurs and local businesses, companies are jumping on SlideShare like it’s going out of style… but that’s the thing – a tool this powerful isn’t going anywhere.
In your corner,
Charlie
