What is LinkedIn SlideShare?
If you’ve ever seen a slideshow presentation (like the one below) embedded into a blog or LinkedIn Pulse post, that is SlideShare. With over 70 million users and 18 million uploads on a wide variety of topics, LinkedIn SlideShare is a top destination for professionals to share industry insights and learn from experts in over 40 topic areas. You can think of it as Pinterest for professionals, where instead of DIY craft ideas you can share ideas and tips on topics such as Leadership & Management, Presentations & Public Speaking, Marketing, Small Business & Entrepreneurship, and much more.
How can LinkedIn SlideShare help your business?
Creating SlideShare presentations is simple — just log in with your LinkedIn account to start clipping slides or uploading your own content. Here are 3 ways using SlideShare can help your business:
1. Establish yourself as a thought leader.
Sharing content that provides value to your target audience is the cornerstone to establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. SlideShare provides a unique platform to share insights on your topics of expertise in the form of slide decks, documents, videos, infographics, or all of the above. Users can follow topics, clipboards, or content creators, providing a variety of ways that your content can find its way to your target audience.
What kind of content should you put on SlideShare?
- Ideas — ex: The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design, Mobile Is Eating the World
- How-To’s & Tips — ex: You Suck At PowerPoint!, 10 Powerful Body Language Tips for your next Presentations
- Case Studies & Quotes — ex: What Would Steve Do? 10 Lessons from the World’s Most Captivating Presenters, 101 Awesome Marketing Quotes
In addition to creating original slide decks, SlideShare has a “Clip Slide” feature that lets you save the most engaging and effective slides to curated Clipboards for future inspiration or use in your LinkedIn Pulse posts or social media (just remember to credit the source).
2. Build audience engagement and brand reach.
“If you build it, they will come.”
Infographics are Liked and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content. If you create insightful SlideShare presentations that provide value, your audience will eagerly share your content and extend its reach. To further encourage sharing, you can include a “tweet this” button inside your slide deck to draw attention to quotable slides. You can also add a CTA within your slides to encourage viewers to click through to other decks, your company website or blog, or your social media channels.
SlideShare presentations are also fully embeddable, and you can easily add them to your LinkedIn profile, Pulse posts, and company website. Views on embedded SlideShares count toward that content’s overall views, which boosts your ranking on SlideShare and helps build your reputation across the web.
3. Reach your target audience and generate qualified leads.
According to SlideShare, over 80% of the site’s 70 million visitors come through targeted search, making the platform the ideal place to reach your potential clients. These are viewers who have identified their interest or need and have navigated to SlideShare in search of a specific topic. Thus, SlideShare is a great place to begin cultivating leads by providing informative content as a first point of exposure to your business. If you choose a popular topic and post attractive and useful presentations to SlideShare, you are likely to see a few hundred views quickly, even without promoting your content.
To better reach your target audience, you can use SlideShare’s built-in analytics panel to track your uploaded content’s performance by views, shares, traffic sources, and engagement metrics. This is much like using post analytics to tailor your content strategy on LinkedIn Pulse (for more details, see our post on How to Reach Your Target Audience on LinkedIn by Using Post Analytics).
SlideShare also offers a paid Lead Generation tool that allows you to insert a customized lead form within your slide decks. Users that engage with your SlideShare content are more likely to fill out a lead form, and adding a lead form at the end of your deck will capture more qualified leads from readers who have made it to the end of your presentation. SlideShare Lead Generation also integrates with HubSpot, Marketo, and Oracle marketing cloud services to make managing your leads simple.
Sharing content on SlideShare helps build exposure for your business, and allows you to reach a targeted audience of professionals looking to learn and engage with content. Best of all, SlideShare presentations can take on a life of their own once embedded and shared across the web, making them a powerful addition to your digital marketing strategy.
For more information about how to use LinkedIn SlideShare to grow your business, you are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at: jabraham@abraham-global-marketing.websitepro.hosting
