SlideShare Blog

7 secrets to becoming a SlideShare power user

by Kit Seeborg on October 29, 2012

In this article, originally published on LinkedIn Today, Ross Mayfield describes the tactics that help SlideShare power users get that extra edge (and more views.)

Using SlideShare to share slides is pretty easy. Being a SlideShare ninja is another thing entirely. In this post (and deck), let me share seven secrets to using SlideShare that you probably shouldn’t know.

1. Most of Your Viewers Come from Search

Presentations are just the kind of thing search engines love to eat. When creating a presentation you tend to pick your words carefully, and that text is somewhere between the terseness of a tweet and the verbosity of a blog post. When you upload content, pay particular attention to the keywords you use in your title, description and tags (in that order) to make your content more findable. Also, note that SlideShare extracts the text from your file and presents it as Transcript below. This Transcript is read by search engines, so your actual content matters.

2. Social Networks Provide the 2nd Most Viewers

The second largest source of traffic you can get for your content is social networks. And if done right, it can go viral and become the largest source. Click all those like buttons to promote your content across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Notice how I put my Twitter @handle in the title above? Every time someone Tweets about my presentation they are also advertising my handle to other potential followers. Also be sure and add the SlideShare apps for LinkedIn and Facebook. All you have to do is log in with either service on SlideShare and it will automate sharing across both social networks.

3. SlideShare is a Social Network

Not enough people realize that connecting with people on SlideShare can substantially increase your content views. First and foremost enrich your profile with your professional identity. Actively Favorite and Comment on other’s content. Follow other people and they may Follow you back so they are subscribed to your uploads.

4. Embed Your Content

Embedding your content into a blog post or web page not only distributes the content there. It also creates a link structure pointing back to your SlideShare content to increase search engine visibility. While a blog is not a content strategy, blogging in tandem with SlideShare can be a big part of it. Every time I write a blog post (like this), I consider making a simple summary of it in a presentation. And whenever I create a presentation, say for speaking at a conference, I can write a one or two paragraph summary of the talk, and embed the deck. This is a good personal tactic, but also one that can scale for businesses. For example, we do interviews for blog case studies, which we then hand over to a design firm to create case study presentations. You can also embed these kinds of decks into landing pages to make them more visual and engaging.

5. Design for SlideShare

Take one look at the SlideShare homepage and you’ll find something different is going on. The design that takes shape on SlideShare is its own style, not traditional corporate powerpoint template. Put the most design work into your title slide, as the first slide in effect serves as a visual advertisement for your content. When someone sees the thumbnail of your content, that image effects the click-through rate to view it. Also note there aren’t long paragraphs and bullet point hell. Use words carefully for people to scan slide-by-slide rapidly. People skim content on SlideShare faster than you would normally deliver slides in a presentation. When uploading to SlideShare, consider saving your PPT into a PDF, as while the details are small, PDF generally can convert and render better on SlideShare.

6. Enrich Your Media

SlideShare supports more than conference presentations. We support pretty much any presentation, document or video format. But even if you are focused on presentations, you can enrich them further. Click edit on your presentation and you can add a YouTube video as a slide. And you can add audio and synch the movement of the slides with our unique SlideCast format.

7. Go Pro

You can be a better ninja with a little investment. SlideShare PRO lets you generate sales leads, have Analytics to understand and track engagement, privately share content, and much more.

So there you have it, 7 secrets to make you a SlideShare ninja. I’m sure I’ve missed a few, so please do others a favor by sharing secrets I’ve missed in the comments below.

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Transform Your Website Into a Customer Attraction Force Field with Magnetic Content

by Guest Author on October 18, 2012

Guest post by Barry Feldman

Attention advertising professionals:

Barry Feldman You won’t be needed any longer. Get your resumes together and get out. We’re web-centric now. You never really fit in that well online and you’re kind of annoying. When I’m online I know what I’m looking for and advertising ain’t it.

Harsh.

I am (was) an advertising professional. (Am I an advertising professional with a death wish?) What the hell happened? Google happened.

You get that, right? Search rules. That simple screen with the horrendous logo and big blank box is right up there with water in terms of your basic human needs.

And those electronic thingamabobs Santa keeps bringing you—the little pile of pixels you only turn off at church—they’re your library, newspaper, bookstore, shopping mall, game room, movie theater, radio, photo album, mail center, telephone, teletext, television, and telecommunications crack. You’re addicted.

Unfortunately Steve Jobs isn’t around anymore to figure out how these devices can feed and nourish you, but someone’s bound to. When that happens, they’ll also be your garden, pantry, fridge and favorite fast food.

New rules:

Search definitely rules the commercial universe, but a number of other things have come to rule too…

Digital rules
Immediate gratification rules
Relationships rule
Social media rules
Content rules

Taylor Swift seems to rule too.

News flash:

Your brand is not what you say it is… It’s what Google says it is. Awesome, eh? And oh-so-true. (I got the passage from page 6 of Mitch Joel’s great book, “Six Pixels of Separation—Everyone is Connected. Connect your business to everyone).”

Let’s ponder this very cool book title. Connect your business to everyone sounds pretty darn good. Sounds profitable. But how do you do it?

Magnetic content.

Content marketing is the process of creating and delivering valuable content to your target customers. Most of the time, it’s free of charge. Turn on the power of content marketing and you get traffic to your site, lower cost leads and sales. You achieve what advertising usually does not. You get people to know, like and trust you.

Is it any wonder everyone’s talking about content marketing? It’s effective.

How it’s done.

Instead of buying media, buying stamps, buying professional phone callers, or buying whatever you used to buy to deliver your message to people who mostly are not interested, you become the media.

It’s easy. And it’s hard.

The easy part is the technology. I want to share this incredible piece of research I recently found about 100 top tools for learning and teaching (otherwise known as content marketing). My favorites on the list (in no particular order) include Slideshare, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Hootsuite, Scoop.it, Google, and of course, WordPress.

The hard part is doing content marketing effectively—magnetically attracting new customers and equipping them to do some magnetizing for your brand too. Yeah, referral business… word of mouth… or my favorite: word of mouse. Call it what you will. It’s the most powerful form of advertising ever. Always will be.

So here’s what you do. You need to stop interrupting people with stuff they don’t want. This will save you a lot of money. Then, you need to start being the expert prospects rely on. This won’t drain your budget, but it will tax your time.

The 7-Step Customer Magnet Program.

I felt the need to capitalize those words. They seem kind of sacred. Soooooo…

I read about content marketing day and night. I go where the marketing heavyweights go. I create content about content marketing. And one of these days (tomorrow probably), I’m going to write a book about the subject.

For now, I created a presentation. I put it on Slideshare. People liked it and I got all kinds of requests to do an article related to it. This is it. Soon to come is the audio track. (Yup, I like to talk almost as much as I like writing).

Dude, would you share the steps already? I hear you.

Determine what action you want customers to take.
Determine what potential buyers need to know.
Create a content plan.
Put a content creation team together.
Get your digital ducks in a row (publishing platforms, social media, equipment, etc.)
Promote what you publish.
Measure everything.

My presentation has all kinds of cool crap (including a little illustration of crap). And I have a lot to say about transforming your website into a customer attraction force field.

Also, I have “21 Pointers to Sharpen Your Website” available to you on my website and also on Slideshare.

I gotta’ go now. I have content to produce. You do too.

About Barry Feldman: After making the rounds in the ad agency business for about a decade, Barry established a freelance copywriting business in 1995. Ever since, he’s partnered with corporate marketing groups, small businesses, ad agencies, and design firms. For over 20 years Barry has worked across a spectrum of product categories for hundreds of companies big and small. Follow Barry on Twitter and SlideShare.

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Five most awesome things I fondly recall about my summer internship at SlideShare

by Guest Author on October 16, 2012

Aakriti Gupta Editor’s note: Here at SlideShare we value the terrific interns that pass through our hallways every year.

Among them May through July of 2012 was Aakriti Gupta, a computer science student who shared recollections of her experience with us here.

Here are the five most awesome things I fondly recall about my summer internship at SlideShare:

1. I’m in!
SlideShare had been acquired by LinkedIn only a few days back and this was visible in the office.

I was introduced to the entire team, most of them wearing their LinkedIn tshirts. I was nervous on the first day but they turned out to be a totally amiable and excited bunch of people.

2. Mentors

I worked with the backend team. Akash, Shishir and Arpit were my team and mentors.

During the first couple of days a lot of new words were thrown at me. Shishir and Akash carefully explained how SlideShare functions as a team and how the backend of the product is laid out. Honestly, I could hardly make sense of all the things but now I realise these are some of the most important things I picked up.

SlideShare has 55 people and doesn’t have a formal internship program in place. Yet, they were very prepared for the interns. The interview process was smooth and quick. A couple of detailed interviews and all was set.

A project was discussed, planned and goals were laid out. They are very careful about understanding a student’s experience and expectations. The best thing about their mentorship is that they perfectly balance “let-her-figure-it-out-herself” and “lets-work-on-it-with-her”.

3. Buzzwords at the lunch table, not!

Their purpose changes all together once you have the SlideShare team together, either at the lunch table or on a Friday evening! You bring up one of the buzzwords to the lunch table and you’ll be sure trigger one of our geeks.

You laugh here, admire each other’s food, share it (maybe), pull each other’s leg but don’t speak of code! The lunch table is also where they give you a warm welcome. Even if you’re a newcomer, they won’t spare you – not from exercises to break the build with your commit, and not from their jokes.

4. DevelopHer Hackday

LinkedIn and SlideShare often have hackdays. One that they organized together – DevelopHer, happened at the end of June. DevelopHer was a women’s hackday, running parallel in Mountain View and Delhi.

This was my first time for 2 things: the first hackday I participated in and the first time I met so many hacker women together! My team mate, Mansi, who traveled all the way from Mumbai, brought with her an awesome hack idea. We started a bit late but by the next morning we had our hack ready.

The brainstorming, the excitement, staying up all night, the final bug fix, the generous supply from the kitchen – it was an unforgettable experience.

5. Eee – o – dee: The lessons I take back

Working in a team: I learnt how working alone on a project, remotely, and working in a team, on-site, are different. I learnt to share the progress of my project with my team. They always had great inputs to give and at the right time.

It is important the way you put forward your research, progress and ideas. The daily morning SCRUM was what set the day productive.

An LGTM: I have worked on a couple of other summer projects, but here I understood what it takes for the team to do several deployments a day – speed, testing, code quality and some serious R & D. The final ‘LGTM’ or ‘Ship it!’ on your code review is your trophy!

They are a bunch of passionate developers and designers, friendly, content and very welcoming. I left after a surprise cake and a short goodbye note.

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How Marketo Uses Slideshare for Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation – SlideShare Case Study

by Guest Author on October 9, 2012

Editor’s note: Jason Miller is the Social Media Strategist & Content Marketing Evangelist at Marketo. In this guest post, Jason shares how Marketo includes SlideShare in their content marketing strategy.

The rise of visual content marketing is forcing marketers everywhere to re-evaluate their overall strategy. No longer can a marketing professional rely solely on white papers and blog posts to get their message to prospective buyers and customers. It’s now vital to include a visual element across all marketing campaigns. Marketo is a big advocate of visual content marketing and SlideShare is an essential part of our overall content strategy.

Throughout 2012 Marketo has had great success using SlideShare as a channel to promote our content. Working with Column Five Media, we created a presentation called How to Build a Better Inbound Marketing Machine. In just over four weeks our presentation had over 133K views and hundreds of shares across the socialsphere.

A few months later, we launched a second custom SlideShare deck using the same formula called Visual Content Marketing and it has achieved very similar results as it has just crossed the 105K views mark. Additionally, both SlideShare presentations rank number one above our competitors for the keywords each focuses on.

So how did we do it?
Now this of course is not an exact science, but having the following elements in place to promote and build awareness around your SlideShare presentation will give it a much better chance of increasing views and shares.

Base your presentation on a topic you are an expert on – We here at Marketo are experts in Marketing Automation, but we also pride ourselves in being leaders in the world of inbound marketing and content marketing as they go hand in hand and play a major supporting role in a successful marketing automation strategy.
Make it a part of something bigger – Our SlideShare presentation is a part of a much larger content initiative. At Marketo, we build our editorial calendar around monthly themes and then put together the content pieces to support that theme. Including but not limited to, SlideShare decks, white papers, blog posts, email campaigns, and infographics.
Take it on the road – We present each of our SlideShare presentations at company meetings, user groups, social meetups, industry conferences and webinars.
Use both paid and earned media in your promotion strategy – As our Inbound Marketing SlideShare deck points out, a marketing strategy that includes elements of both inbound and outbound marketing is vital for spreading your marketing message far beyond your initial reach.
Work with a partner who understands your goals. If you are planning on creating content for SlideShare with a partner, make sure that your goals are aligned and that you clearly state the objectives well in advance.

The Results: With a bit of careful planning and cross functional alignment of your goals, the results are tremendous. Here are the highlights.

Marketo lead gen results

Pulling leads directly from SlideShare
Marketo integrates with SlideShare forms so that each of the downloads listed above sync directly into Marketo. We even have the option to trigger alerts to our sales development team when certain keywords are typed into the comment section of the download form within SlideShare. This strategy turns SlideShare into a lead generation machine that is completely automated.

Want a SlideShare Network for your organization? Contact the SlideShare enterprise sales team.

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Presentations are part of award-winning strategy – Mark Johnson brings home the BE2 gold

by Kit Seeborg on October 3, 2012

There have been the Bloggies and the Vloggies, the Emmys and the Oscars, but have you thought of submitting your presentations for global social media awards? That’s what SlideShare community member Mark Johnson FAIA did, and brought home two coveted BE2 awards.

Mark Johnson, FAIA BE2 is a social media advocacy organization for the built environment. Founded in 2008 as Be2Camp, BE2 held the world’s first barcamp style event for the construction industry in London. Since then BE2 has organized over 15 barcamp styled events, as well as BE2Talks showcasing thought leaders in the built environment. BE2Awards are currently the only social media awards for the built environment.

BE2Awards are global, and voting is open to the public. We were very excited to learn that Mark received not one, but two BE2 awards for incorporating SlideShare presentations into his social media content strategy. We’ve written about Mark’s approach to social media and presentation content. Now his reach has increased exponentially, thanks to the BE2 community.

Here’s what BE2Awards had to say about Mark’s winning submission for Best AEC PR/Marketing Campaign:

“…(recognizes) the pioneering social media marketing initiatives he completed in 2012 for Formica Group, a global brand in the AEC Industry. His work and collaboration is documented in the presentation ‘Social Media Marketing for the AEC Industry’ at SlideShare.net. This case study will be featured in Business to Business Marketing Management: A Global Perspective, a college textbook by Jim Blythe and Alan Zimmerman, to be released in early 2013.”

Social Media Marketing for the AEC Industry from Mark Johnson

and for Best Education and Learning Project:

“…his presentations on SlideShare leverage his years of experience as a designer and marketer to present informative and inspiring case studies and how-to lessons. Void of hype or speculation, Mark provides real world examples of social media at work. Many of his presentations are replicable; they serve as reproducable plans for the AEC professional who desires to maximize online time and effort.”

Congratulations, Mark, and thanks for inspiring the SlideShare community!

Have you won an award for your use of presentations? We’d love to hear about it – please leave a comment below.

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3 clever ways to get more mileage out of your content with SlideShare

by Guest Author on September 27, 2012

Editor’s note: we’re pleased to welcome Gregory Ciotti as a guest author for the SlideShare blog. Gregory manages content and inbound marketing for Help Scout, and regularly blogs about content marketing and psychology at Sparring Mind.

When it comes to successful content marketing in 2012 (and beyond), visuals have and will continue to play a pivotal role in creating a successful and memorable content strategy. While creating slideshow based content for your company’s blog is certainly a smart tactic, there are a few other really clever ways to get more mileage out of your content by using the SlideShare platform.

Today I’m going to break down 3 simple tactics that you can utilize to step up your content strategy with minimal extra legwork. Let’s get started!

1. Repurpose larger content into slideshow formats

This is one of the tactics that I love the most, because the reward vs. time tradeoff is very much in your favor. Recently, the Help Scout team and I published a very long e-book entitled 25 Ways to Thank Your Customers. It did well with our blog’s readers, but we knew it could reach a larger audience if it found the right platform.

Fortunately, SlideShare served as the perfect place to “unleash” our e-book to the world, because it has a very professional audience full of decision-makers who aren’t afraid of in-depth and data-driven content. After an upload and an initial guest post, we were selected for the homepage and ended up generating close to 20,000 views. That’s a very substantial benefit for the simple action of re-purposing existing content!

We even broke down our latest infographic into a slideshow format and uploaded it to SlideShare:

It is also research-heavy, but we know that SlideShare is a popular resource for B2B content marketing in part because so many of its users are working professionals and small-business owners.

Last but not least, I’ve even seen old blog posts get re-structured with some visual flair and uploaded to SlideShare, some even generating over 100,000 views.

2. Make data-driven content easy to consume

If there is one thing that you need to know about SlideShare’s audience, it’s that it isn’t afraid to dig into healthy data sets, especially when they pertain to business and marketing related topics.

One other thing you should know about data-driven content in general is that nearly anyone can enjoy it if it’s presented in a manner that is easy to digest.

Data-centric posts often reach the homepage of places like HackerNews and people love well researched information, but staring at mounds of numeric data can leave a lot of people feeling overwhelmed and not as anxious to “dive in” to the content at hand. This can be easily remedied and made to appeal to both audiences by the use of data-backed presentations that are highly visual and easy to browse.

Our friends at HubSpot did an amazing job with this tactic in their presentation 50 Mobile Marketing Facts:

While a mountain of mobile-centric marketing facts would be too much for the average reader, a collection of well made and generously simple slides allowed this presentation to become incredibly popular, currently sitting at over 92,000 views!

The KISSmetrics channel on SlideShare also does a great job of sharing very data-intensive presentations on analytics, but in a beautifully designed format that is easy to keep clicking through.

All in all, if you have a big set of data that would be perfect for a content piece but you’re afraid that you might overwhelm your readers, definitely look into structuring this content as a presentation on SlideShare.

3. Give a second life to your past webinars

Webinars are some of the most engaging forms of content that you can create. Where else can you present live to a huge amount of current and prospective customers, all while giving them insane value?

One of the few problems with live webinars is that you don’t get all that much mileage out of your slide deck. Once the webinar is over, it seems like it’s time for that presentation to start collecting dust. If you are creating long-lasting (“evergreen”) webinar content, this is a huge waste. Webinar content can find a “second wind” with a deviously simple tactic: upload the webinar decks to SlideShare instead of letting them rot on your hard drive!

One of the biggest marketing webinars this year was the State of SEO Internet Marketing event with Dharmesh Shah and Rand Fishkin. With tons of valuable information that was going to remain relevant for months to come, I knew the HubSpot team wasn’t going to let such a great presentation go to waste.

No surprise when they uploaded it to their highly popular SlideShare channel, and even less of a surprise later when they were able to generate an additional 60,000 views:

This move was a no-brainer. Since the webinar had a registration attached to it, this later release on SlideShare allowed tens of thousands of people to view the content and share it freely, generating leads from viewers even if they didn’t watch the webinar the first time around.

If you ever decide to put on a webinar for your readers, be sure to gain extra exposure with a late release of the slide deck via SlideShare. With thousands of professionals available on the platform, there’s no reason to miss out on getting extra mileage out of each and every webinar deck.

Your Turn

What did you think of these simple strategies for getting more utility out of SlideShare? Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the content strategist for Help Scout, the invisible help desk that makes email support a breeze. You can follow Help Scout on Twitter @HelpScout.

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