If your business is focused on content marketing, SlideShare, deeming itself “the quiet giant of content marketing,” presents the perfect opportunity to share your company’s reports and presentations.
SlideShare is the world’s largest professional content sharing community, housing presentations with a range of diverse topics, including Top Albums of the 70’s, Facebook For Non-Profits, and Year of the Dragon – 2012.
If you can think of the topic, you can most likely find a presentation about it on SlideShare. In fact, we even found a presentation on SlideShare called “SlideShare 101” from SlideShare COO Amit Ranjan that blew our minds away. Meta, right?
Here are some tips from the deck along with our own.
1. Use SlideShare for Research
Organizations like MSLGroup, Social Fresh, and even NASA regularly post their reports on SlideShare, so its a great research tool for finding credible sources.
It’s also a great tool for finding presentations given at events. If you couldn’t make it to Austin for SXSW last year, for example, you can still see Chief Ninja of SCVNGR & LevelUp Seth Priebatsch’s keynote on SlideShare.
2. Make Presentations Short and Visual
There are many theories about the perfect presentation, but we have facts. Fourty-five percent of SlideShare presentations contain 10 to 30 slides, and another 33% of presentations contain less than 10 slides. Furthermore, the average presentation contains 19 photos and 24 words per slide.
So, keep your presentations short and on-point. We think this presentation, called Who Am I?, is a great example of how to make a short, visually-appealing presentation that makes a statement.
3. Post a Variety of Content
SlideShare supports presentations with embedded PDFs, videos, and other documents. So, get creative with the type of content you’re uploading.
For example, have you considered producing compelling infographics? We found an infographic (originally uploaded as a PDF) produced by SlideShare about content marketing stats on its site. Now that’s interesting stuff.
4. Use Slidecast to Add Audio
Expand your variety of content with interviews, webinars, and lectures. Check out this interview by 2Modern with designer Sandy Chilewich.
5. Make your Presentations Social and Searchable
SlideShare’s audience finds its way to the site via organic search, social networks, and other SlideShare content. Help increase your presentation’s virality by sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ along with tagging your presentation, like this one on Social Media Around the World in 2011 by Steven van Belleghem.
With a free user login and a single upload, you can share your presentations with SlideShare’s 60 million monthly visitors. A majority of Slideshare’s audience are professional business owners – but by how much? Slideshare has five times the traffic from business owners than other sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. If you focus on business to business content marketing, here is your audience.
Image courtesy of Flickr, bionicteaching
