SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn in 2012) is a great platform for getting yourself found by thousands of well-connected people who don’t know you yet—but who should. Not just clients and prospective clients, but journalists, analysts, speaker bureaus and conference program organizers all looking for experts on topics that are right in your wheelhouse. Think of Slideshare as YouTube for professional presentations (not cat videos) and can easily accommodate PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations.
1. Take the descriptive tags seriously. For ideas, see how other wealth managers, estate planners and business succession planning experts are tagging their presentations. According to Hubspot, SlideShare presentations carry lots of weight in search results, so you should be targeting the keywords you want to get found for in search in the slideshows you upload.
2.
Treat your title slide like a video thumbnail. Your title slide must be eye-catching
from both a content and visual point of view.
3. Personally brand EVERY SINGLE slide. Put your name, company name, web address and phone on each slide or page of your content. Not every SlideShare user will get to your presentation from the title page. Make sure they remember and credit you when they share, clip or download your digital words of wisdom.
3. Personally brand EVERY SINGLE slide. Put your name, company name, web address and phone on each slide or page of your content. Not every SlideShare user will get to your presentation from the title page. Make sure they remember and credit you when they share, clip or download your digital words of wisdom.
4.
Be generous…to a point.
Like it or not, we’re in the sharing economy. Don’t be stingy about sharing
your smarts with the world. Put most of your slides or a chapter of next book
on SlideShare free of charge, but don’t provide anything else that’s
proprietary or of deeper value unless users contact you directly for more
information. See Tip #8 for more about calls-to-action.
5. Long form is OK. Even in this A.D.D. era of tweets, vines and snaps, social media experts like Dan Zarrella have data indicating that longer slideshows perform better than shorter presentations. For instance, did you know that presentations with 60+ slides or longer generate the most views? Unlike most social media channels in which shorter content tends rules, Zarella says SlideShare users welcome comprehensive content. Again, they’re primarily professionals.
6. Remember your audience. One reason SlideShare is so useful for thought leadership marketing is that is that is core users are well educated professionals (hence its attraction to LinkedIn). Unlike the casual followers you might get from Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, most SlideShare users are searching for content that will help them advance professionally or build their businesses. This is also a good indicator of the types of content that performs well on SlideShare.
7. Looks matter. Strong, bold colors and large text to capture users' attentions and make the content easy to follow along. Provide detailed charts, graphs, images and graphics that are easy to scan and understand. On the web you only have a split second to capture users’ attention.
8. DON’T let downloaders be freeloaders. Anyone who is familiar with SlideShare will tell you to include a final slide featuring a call-to-action for lead generation or potential speaking engagements or strategic alliances.
Conclusion
There are a number of other good knowledge sharing platforms out there for smart professionals like you. We’ll get to them in a future post, but we wanted to start with SlideShare since most of you are regular LinkedIn users, you are already great presenters, it has critical mass and you can’t beat the price. If you have other favorite knowledge sharing tools, please send them along, and we’ll mention in a future post.
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TAGS: SlideShare tips for
professionals, Dan Zarella
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