10 Ways to Use Slideshare in a Social Media Strategy
60 million visitors a month head to Slideshare.
If you’re unimpressed, think about this: it’s considerably less social than other networks.
While users can follow others, it’s primarily a center for information discovery.
The most-common tags on the network are business, market, trends, research, social media, and statistics.
If your B2B brand is seeking ways to get your content in front of more B2B decisionmakers, adding Slideshare to your social media strategy may be part of the solution.
Brand specialist David Brier recently stated in an interview with Forbes that the difference is primarily in the audience.
While both YouTube and Slideshare are content-sharing hubs, consumers head to YouTube for entertainment, while
Slideshare is “targeted towards professionals seeking content and information.”
In other words, the website’s audience is waiting for your messages. Where are you?
Here are some more ways Slideshare SEO and visibility can boost your content and social media strategy:
1. Slideshare SEO Is Outstanding
When presentations are uploaded to Slideshare, your on-slide text is quickly transcribed and indexed by Google. As a result, it’s a giant in the social media strategy for referring organic traffic from major search engines. Joe Chernov of Eloqua reports their company receives more traffic from Slideshare than YouTube and Google+ combined.
Forget whatever your college professors told you about keeping the text on your presentations extra-sparse; the average Slideshare content has 24 words per slide. Keyword-optimized presentations are key to winning the race to the top of Google, so never forget about SEO optimization of your Slideshare content.
2. It Will Help You Win a New Audience
Despite the meteoric rise of branded content as a tool for B2B decision makers, only 58% of consumers trust corporate websites for information. Slideshare can bridge the gap in bringing your information to a new audience who might not be willing to click through to your website from Google. Todd Wheatland of Kelly Services believes journalists view Slideshare as a “neutral ground” for content discovery.
3. It’s Multi-Media
If you’ve been mistakenly assuming that Slideshare is all about slides, it isn’t entirely true. They remain the most-common format used on the website, but PDFs, videos, and a number of other formats are also acceptable.
4. You Can Integrate With Google+ Hangouts
Turn your brand’s next Google+ hangout session with prospects, customers, or peers, into an educational session by integrating a Slideshare presentation with your session. The two factors can integrate seamlessly within your social media strategy, providing a free and simple option for remote presentations, employee education, or mini-conferences.
5. It’s a Well-Kept Secret
As brands worldwide discover just how effective branded content is at driving website traffic, and converting revenue, we’re in the midst of what Rand Fishkin has dubbed a “content arms race.” The brands that win are those who discover new and ingenious ways to attract attention. Slideshare still has only around 16 million registered users, which means your competitors may not be clued-in to content marketing’s best kept secret.
6. It’s a Blank Canvas
A decade ago, the concept of a branded YouTube channel would have been unthinkable to even the savviest digital marketers. Now, 79% of the Global Fortune 100 are using YouTube to spread their video content. Slideshare supports branded channels, and the brands that win will be those who put the legwork in to discover what works best on the network. Brier writes “it’s truly a blank canvas that can be revolutionized, and I see that happening.”
7. It Has Analytics
In case you’re concerned that once you’ve uploaded content to Slideshare, you’ll never know exactly how it did, rest assured that the platform provides analytics to brands. The Send Tracker function provides insight on views and embeds of your presentation.
8. It’s Basically Cloud Storage
While Slideshare is a powerful member of your social media strategy arsenal, the network also doubles as free or low-cost cloud storage (did we mention that free membership to the site provides unlimited uploads of files up to 10MB?). Presentations can be set to private or limited views, meaning you can back up your work, or provide secure access to colleagues or clients.
9. It’s Got Serious Personal Branding Potential
It’s relatively easy to stand out on Slideshare, especially when you consider the network in comparison to the 500 million published Tweets each day. By providing insight on conferences on Slideshare in real time, a designer Jesse Desjardins won 2.5 million views and was appointed to Social Media Director of the Australian Tourism Board.
10. You Can Generate Leads
If your brand ultimately decides to purchase SlideShare Pro, you can integrate your account with your customer relationship management (CRM) software to generate leads without ever leaving the social media network. Lead capture forms can be inserted directly into the presentation, so there’s no risk you’ll lose interest in the process of directing visitors to your website.
Are you using Slideshare for B2B Marketing and integrating it into your social media strategy? Do you care about SEO optimization of your Slideshare content? How does it benefit your brand? We’ll be happy to read your ideas in the comments below.
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