6 Ways SlideShare Can Help You Better Reach Your Audience

SlideShare isn’t new; it’s been around since 2006. In fact, you may be one of the 60 million users that uses SlideShare each month. So why write a post on a long-established social media site? Because it may be one of the biggest marketing tools that’s not in your social media toolkit.

SlideShare gives brands a platform to share presentations, documents, PDFs, videos and webinars with a very active community of reporters, buyers and senior executives. In addition, SlideShare uploads are mobile-friendly, have significant SEO value and are very easily shared on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Here are six ways that SlideShare can help you better reach your target audience.

1)     Make SEO-Friendly Presentations

SlideShare’s presentations are highly indexed by search engines, which means that with the right keyword strategy your presentations will appear higher in search engine results. If traffic from search engines is important to your business, you should consider adding SlideShare to your touchpoint plan.

2)     Drive Referral Traffic

For those who find your presentation via search engines, SlideShare can be a great way to introduce them to your brand. As they review your presentation(s), there are many opportunities to direct these viewers back to your website. In fact Mashable notes that SlideShare sends more referral traffic to their website than Google+ and YouTube combined.

3)     Make Presentations Shareable

SlideShare has always offered visitors a plethora of sharing and embedding options so they can easily share what they’ve learned with their social networks. If you have a really interesting presentation that is filled with great content, your presentation can go viral, reaching even more of your target audience. To further demonstrate SlideShare’s social media value, LinkedIn recently purchased SlideShare so the two sites can become more integrated.

4)     Repurpose Existing Content

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You probably already have content that you’ve used in white papers or blog posts that can be repurposed into a SlideShare presentation. Boil down the main points and add some captivating graphics, and you’ve got an interesting and shareable presentation ready to upload to SlideShare.

5)     Add Lead Generation Hooks

Premium members ($19/month) have the ability to add lead generation forms into their presentations. These forms give interested viewers an easy way to request more information at the moment their interest is piqued, without having to navigate your website to find your contact form.

6)     Connect with the Media

By design, SlideShare hosts a tremendous number of data-rich and thought-leading presentations. As such, the site attracts key journalists and bloggers who are seeking content for their next story or post. Your presentation may provide just the right information that will help them complete their story. Your great content will be rewarded with copious referral traffic from the resulting article.

SlideShare has always been a social media Cinderella, overshadowed by the larger and more popular “first-tier” platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you’re targeting a content-hungry, professional audience, SlideShare must not be overlooked.