Brands are well aware by now that a presence on social media is a necessity for public relations in this day and age. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn claim the top three places for most popular social media sites for businesses, but there is one network that we’ve been working with clients to leverage recently that has been providing a lot of return. SlideShare is an online community that allows you to share presentations. The site is seven years old and, as of 2012, has 51.6 million monthly visitors. It was acquired by LinkedIn last year, allowing for easy integration with an already established online community.
The Supplementing Superpower of SlideShare
EBooks, white papers and blogs are a great way to build awareness around a product or a campaign, but slideshows can share the same information in a new format. SlideShare allows video, graphics and even MP3s to accompany text. My colleague, Brendan, touched on the five senses of communication in September, and how sounds and colors can have a great effect on audiences’ attention. SlideShare also allows you to share PDFs and word documents, making it easy to keep all important documents in one place. And if you don’t want to share everything with the general public, SlideShare has the capability to privately share documents between colleagues, clients, and others as well.
Tips for Getting Started on SlideShare
- Presentations should have a reasonable word-to-image ratio—too many words can make for a boring preso and too many images can take away from the overall message.
- Follow industry topics and leaders—although the format is different, SlideShare is still a social media platform. Following topics such as “Big Data” or “Cloud Computing” can offer a wealth of information.
- Sync SlideShare to your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to unify your online presence.
- Embed your brand’s YouTube videos.
- Generate business leads by using Leadshare—Leadshare enables brands to track who downloads their files so they can be used as leads in the future.
- Sync MP3s to your presentations to create an on-demand webinar.
This post was first published by Maya Smith on March Communications’ blog PR Nonsense.