Are you using SlideShare, rebranded as LinkedIn SlideShare, and LinkedIn marketing to grow your business? If you answered “No,” you don’t know what you’re missing out on.
Back in 2012, LinkedIn bought SlideShare for $119 million.
Why did LinkedIn buy the smaller company for so much money?
The answer is simple: SlideShare is the YouTube of slideshows. The presentation-sharing platform helps professionals to share messages in a visual way and makes LinkedIn more engaging. What’s more, it has 29 million unique visitors which means you can use it to take your business to the next level.
Rand Fishkin, the founder of SEOmoz, is a regular user of SlideShare and says it is a critical element of any company’s marketing strategy. If you are ready to start using LinkedIn and SlideShare effectively, use these tips to maximize the sites.
Use Keywords and Key Phrases
It is not enough to use keywords on your website and blog, you must also use them off-page to show search engines that your digital footprint is applicable to specific keywords and key phrases. Use similar keywords on your website, LinkedIn, SlideShare, and other social media sites. If you aren’t sure of the keywords to use, use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and Wordstream. Keyword research is the focal point of SEO practices and pay-per-click marketing.
How you use keywords will affect your success on SlideShare. As with any other social network, people use keywords when searching. The right keywords will ensure they find you. It’s very easy to optimize your slides, but a few tweaks can make them rank more highly. For instance, you can use your keyword as the filename, include it in the title, in the description, and in the tags.
Share Valuable Industry Information
According to LinkedIn, people are interested in industry insights more than any other thing. Industry insights are the most demanded form of content among LinkedIn members. Informative and useful updates have high engagement rates because they give users relevant information. Your followers want to be productive and successful so you should provide useful information. Make sure industry insights comprise a major part of your content and you’ll be sure to make your LinkedIn marketing a success.
The same applies to SlideShare. Make sure your slides are filled with relevant information. However, don’t make them too long or you’ll lose the attention of your readers. If you are sharing a white paper, create a SlideShare summary. Users get bored if a white paper is too long. Make slides with links to important sections of the white paper so readers can focus on what interests them most. When you make it easy for viewers to find valuable information, they will read all your slides.
Connect SlideShare and LinkedIn
Users can easily connect their SlideShare and LinkedIn profiles. This is great because you can use the profiles as two parts of one platform rather than separate platforms. Connecting your SlideShare profile with your LinkedIn profile has many benefits. It enhances the reach of your uploads on both platforms and can help you to grow your network of professionals. It also helps you to build your reputation – the more quality content you have, the more clout you have.
Linking your two profiles also helps you to improve your knowledge and skills. As you connect with more professionals, you discover new opportunities and learn to develop your talents.
Post Your Presentations on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the go-to site for professionals who want to educate themselves on industry topics. It is the perfect place to promote your professional SlideShare content. Post your SlideShare presentations on LinkedIn and share them on your company page. In addition, add your SlideShare content to your profile’s summary page. Open your profile and click on the box with a plus sign next to it to add a link to your slides. Also share your slides on your other social media accounts. When you add a link to your presentations, you make your profile stand out and people can click on it to see more of your content.
Show Up on SlideShare’s Homepage
Every day, SlideShare staff choose about a dozen presentations to feature on their homepage. Getting featured on the homepage can give a presentation a lot of extra exposure. The best part is that you can easily have your presentation featured. Simply follow the site’s guidelines and you will enhance your chances of getting noticed by the staff. Post fresh content early in the day so readers and SlideShare editors can quickly notice it.
Presentations with a high number of views usually get picked. But remember that all featured presentations are handpicked, so do not try to cheat the system.
Integrate SlideShare into Your Blogging Strategy
In order to increase the reach of your presentations, insert them in your blog. SlideShare is very useful because it can be integrated into a blog, a landing page, and social networks. It allows you to keep your audience engaged on one platform.
You can upload Word documents, Adobe PDF portfolios, and PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare and share them on your blog. You can also incorporate your presentations into your marketing campaigns. You can alter the height and width of a slideshow before publishing it on your blog. Make certain you have a social media strategy to generate shares and likes so as to make a big impact when you post. If you want to generate traffic from SlideShare, add the URL of your homepage in the call to action. Since a homepage URL is usually short, it is very easy to remember. Even lazy people will be able to insert it in their browsers and find your site.
Wrapping It Up
While many professionals use LinkedIn as a marketing hub, they forget that its lesser-known counterpart is just as useful. When LinkedIn is used together with SlideShare, the two can make a business grow from strength to strength. Out of all the social networks, SlideShare is the most underutilized and overlooked. Only a few marketers upload content on the site, which means there’s less competition than on other social sites. Start using SlideShare today and you will be amazed at how your business grows.
What an excellent post. Very instructive and a big boot up my behind as I have both accounts and underuse them. I have been aiming to get back to LinkedIn for while… now I’ll do both.
Thanks for great bit of training.
Thank for the appreciation Ed, definitely glad to help, it’s true that it takes time but every little bit helps.