8 Reasons Why SlideShare is Important for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is here to stay, and I think most marketers have come to accept that and embrace it. Many companies are learning that social media platforms are a great catalyst in which to distribute their message and get their content out to the end user.

While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ dominate the social landscape, Slideshare is a platform that I believe has a lot of benefits and is being underutilized by many companies.

Here are eight reasons why your company should be using Slideshare as a part of your social media marketing.

1. SlideShare has a huge audience that can drive traffic to your site

   SlideShare has over 60 million unique visitors and 3 billion slide views per month. The White House uploaded a presentation (yes, even they have a Slideshare page) of the 2014 State of the Union address, and in less than 12 hours, it had more than 27,000 views. Once the audience finds your content, you can then put links in your presentation that go back to your site, giving them more information on a subject or whatever you may choose.

2. 

   SlideShare has a huge B2B Audience looking for high-quality content to help them with their work.

   It has a very large B2B audience

   In fact, SlideShare’s primary demographic is B2B users that seeking high-quality content, generally for business purposes. As long as markters include relevant tags in your presentations, they should be able to attract their desired audience.

3. SlideShare can be a lead-generation tool

   One little-known fact about SlideShare is that if you sign up for the Pro version ($20-$50/month), you can put a registration either in the middle of your presentation (10 slides in) or at the end. Marketers can either slightly tailor or completely customize the registration form, depending on how much you’re willing to pay.

4. Use SlideShare for branding and to create top-of-mind awareness

   Publishing presentations around your key topics, products, and industries is a great way to get your company’s message out into the world and establish yourself as a thought leader within your particular industry. Imagine if you have a presentation that is 40 slides, and if someone scrolls through every slide, that person will have seen your logo 40 times (assuming you put it on each one of your slides) in addition to seeing your presentation on your company’s SlideShare page.

   If you have the resources, with the highest-level of SlideShare Pro, you can completely customize the color, look, and feel of your page (Content Marketing Institute is a great example of that).

5. Learn what your audience wants

   Not sure what type of information your audience is looking for? The great thing about PowerPoint presentations is that they’re relatively cheap and easy; whereas they’re easy to create, a company can create 5, 10, or even 20 different presentations regarding different subjects, and after a month or two, the company can view their SlideShare analytics to see which presentation is getting the most views (a Pro account is required in order to view the analytics).

6. 

   Google loves SlideShare content and ranks it very well for SEO purposes.

   SlideShare has fantastic SEO benefits

   It’s no secret that Google loves SlideShare and that Google ranks SlideShare very favorably in their algorithms. Thankfully, SlideShare intuitively pulls text from your presentation in order to give it more SEO juice; so make sure your presentations are quality content and keyword-centric. Additionally, links to your website from your SlideShare presentations give you great, quality inbound links for your SEO.

7. It’s another great avenue to build a community loyalists and evangelists

   Just like most every other social media platform, users can “subscribe” to a company’s channel and be notified when a new presentation is uploaded. Subscribers should be treated with high regard as they have actively sought to subscribe to your company’s content, and eventually can possibly be converted to customers if nurtured correctly.

8. It’s great content for content marketing strategy

   If your company is focused on creating content for your content marketing strategy or company blog, SlideShare is a fantastic tool for creating engaging content. SlideShare presentations can easily be embedded into blog posts, integrated into a company’s LinkedIn Company Page or Group Page, or included as links in e-newsletters.

How do you utilize SlideShare for business? Let me know in the comments!

-Lance Brown