Image courtesy of DigitalRalph’s photostream
The convergence of visual content and a changing SEO landscape can lead to a few certain realizations. One of those is that these trends continue down a deeper path, and that the old tricks just aren’t going to cut it anymore. Luckily, some real winners have been born out of the changes and trends, with SlideShare.net being one of those.
SlideShare is owned by professional social networking powerhouse, LinkedIn, so look to see the authority of SlideShare grow, as long as LinkedIn remains a big player. Here are some ways that SlideShare can be incorporated to grow your audience.
1) Visual Learning – As the trend toward images and visual content only continues to grow, with momentum from Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and others, SlideShare is a nice way to tap into this user behavior. While the platform started off as a place to, quite literally, share slides, it has evolved into more but slides and visual content remain dominant. If you have a nice PDF or PowerPoint that gets a lot of attention in other arenas, SlideShare may be the spot for you to post this content online.
2) Embed at LinkedIn – I already mentioned that SlideShare was purchased by LinkedIn, but even better, LinkedIn has made SlideShare content work rather nicely within LinkedIn. A recent enhancement on LinkedIn was the ability to add rich media, which is perfect for a slide deck and other SlideShare content. Not only will you get traffic and views via SlideShare, but you can spruce up and get views on your LinkedIn profile, as well.
3) Capture Leads – While this is a paid, pro feature, it’s worth mentioning. SlideShare offers a lead capture function to pop up at the conclusion of your SlideShare content. So when someone gets through your presentation and is really into the material he or she just saw, he or she will have the ability to subscribe for more information. Given the amount of traffic and views SlideShare files are generating, this is a slick and powerful offering that makes lead generation drop dead easy.
4) Video, Slides, PDFs – And, while I touched on this earlier, I need to hammer it home since many people still think of SlideShare as just PowerPoint files. To the contrary, video, PDFs and other media can be added to SlideShare, making it similar to a site like Scribd, but with much better branding, recognition and excellent traffic.
5) Optimization and Traffic – Think of SlideShare optimization as being similar to YouTube, since SlideShare is becoming a search engine for presentations and other content, like YouTube is for video. Each file that is uploaded has a title, category and description that can be optimized to perform better and get more traffic through the search engines, as well as via the native SlideShare search functionality.
