Everyone knows Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are the top social networks your business needs to be active. Especially when you’re looking to reach a large audience and get the word about your products. However, when it comes to getting in front of business professionals, LinkedIn is the cream of the crop with 55% of LinkedIn users earning more than $60k, of which 27% earn more than $100k.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll come across SlideShare which happens to be the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. Which was also acquired by LinkedIn in $118.75 million deal in May 2012.
What Makes SlideShare The Secret Weapon For Inbound Marketers?
The main appeal of SlideShare for marketers is that it attracts over 60 million unique visitors a month. Which means it can give your content, and business a major boost in traffic.
Another thing to consider are the SEO benefits that come with uploading content to SlideShare. For instance if you take content from your website and turn it into a presentation. The SlideShare presentations will most likely be ranked higher than your web content.
You can also search engine optimize your presentations by using keywords in your documents, title and description. The cool thing with SlideShare is that it actually transcribes the content in your files, which make it visible to search engines.
One more advantage to using SlideShare is its ability to help you discover new content. What this means is that even if you don’t have large following on the website, you’re able to attract a over 100 views just by uploading a presentations, giving a title, description and assigning relevant tags to it.
SlideShare Essentials
Even though the website is not your usual social network, it does incorporate several features commonly found on Facebook and Google+, such as the ability to like, comment and follow.
SlideShare is often referred to as the Youtube for PowerPoint. And while it allows users to upload video files – the site is more commonly used for presentations in PowerPoint and Keynote format. SlideShare also supports PDFs, Microsoft Office and other iWorks documents, including Word, Pages, Excel and Numbers.
Anyone can view a document or presentation on SlideShare without being signed in. Visitors can also download files from the website, however you’ll be required to sign up for a free account to do so.
PRO Features
The free account will only give you a limited set of features to play around and get the most out SlideShare for lead generation. The PRO Plans begin at at $19/month with the Silver account and increases to $49/month for the Gold account. The platinum gives you unlimited access to all features available, however you will need to contact the SlideShare team for a quote.
Below I’ve listed top 3 features I think inbound marketers will find most valuable when going with one of the PRO Plans.
Analytics
The premium plans give you access to the analytics dashboard, allowing you to measure how your presentations are performing. Which lets you view key metrics such as company, location, referrers, search keywords and social shares.
LeadShare
However, inbound marketers with find SlideShare’s lead capturing tool – LeadShare – the most compelling reason for upgrading.
Just like the name implies, LeadShare is all about capturing lead information via forms you can insert into your SlideShare presentations.
The neat thing about this feature is that you can target the form to appear in specific countries, and also download your lead information in a Excel sheet. Which you can use to import into an email marketing tool like MailChimp.
Video Upload
Despite its reputation as a place to upload your presentations, ebooks and PDFs – SlideShare allows you to upload up to 10 videos with the Silver plan.
You’re probably wondering why this is relevant? While YouTube has become notorious for its funny cats content – SlideShare is a place where people come for business related content. The video upload feature on SlideShare has been under utilised and you won’t see many videos available. Which increases the chances of your video getting viewed.
SlideShare was originally designed to make sharing presentations between employees easier. But has now grown to become a vibrant community and the go-to place for inbound marketers to reach a business audience. With all talk about Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn it’s easy to overlook the potential of SlideShare.
Below you’ll find a infographic with some interesting statistics about SlideShare.
Want to find new and relevant keywords based on traffic growth potential? Check out Cuutio’s new Keyword Suggestion Tool here by signing up or logging in.
Image by sylvain kalache
