Top 5 Slideshare Marketing Tips

Guest post by Kristina Allen, Online Marketing Manager at ion interactive, the makers of the LiveBall marketing optimization software.

One of my favorite social marketing activities right now is creating Slideshare presentations. Slideshare is a directory of presentations. Think of it as YouTube, but for Powerpoint.

I really love creating short (read: easily consumable) but informative Slideshares (view example) and then socializing them with my networks. The presentations have been very effective content marketing pieces for me, and they can be for you as well.

Top 5 Slideshare Marketing Tips

1. Use lots of visual metaphors
   As a general rule of thumb, PowerPoint type presentations shouldn’t be text heavy (less than 7 lines of text is considered a best practice by many). They’re a compliment to the speaker and not the other way around.

   When creating presentations as social content, they need to be even less text heavy. Think about it, when you’re in front of a room speaking, there are lots of social norms in play. You’re in the front so everyone knows to pay attention to you, and similarly everyone knows it would be rude for lots of people to walk out while you’re just getting started. However, online you have very little time to capture someone’s attention before they’re on to the next thing.  To quickly capture and keep interest I like to use pretty pictures.

   I usually include one large visual metaphor per slide and 1-3 sentences of advice that relates to the image.

   

2. Include a call-to-action
   In the last slide I almost always include a call-to-action (in link or button form) for the viewer to get something additional. When they click the link or button they leave the Slideshare presentation and enter a landing page with a short form they fill out in order to receive something else of value.

   This allows me to generate leads for my sales team, and makes Slideshare a truly valuable social marketing activity with a strong and traceable ROI.
   

3. Create lead gen campaigns with LeadShare
   One way to generate leads right from within the Slideshare presentation interface is to sign up for a Pro account (packages start at just $19/month) and start using LeadShare. LeadShare places a lead gen form within your presentation. You can choose if you want it to be located in the middle of your presentation or if you want it to appear after the last slide.

   With your pro account you’ll get minimum 30 leads per month, but you have to use their basic form, which doesn’t allow for any customization. I highly suggest using the Pay-Per-Lead function also available for Pro members, where you can customize the offer and the questions you want to ask. This allows you to better qualify leads for your sales team based on the answers you receive. It’s not expensive either, I currently ask two custom questions on my most used successful campaign and it only costs $5/lead.

   

4. Keep the presentations short
   You want to keep your presentations short for two big reasons. One, you want the people to make it to your offer(s) at the end. And two, when they reach that offer they should want more because you’re presentation was high value and left them needing to know more about your topic.

   You can define “short” for yourself, but to me this means between 8-15 slides.

5. Make descriptions and tags keyword rich
   When you upload each presentation, you’ll have the opportunity to do three important things: edit the title of the presentation, write a description and add tags.

   Make sure all of these are keyword rich (just like blog posts and videos) so they are more easily found!

Are you currently using Slideshare for content + social marketing? I’d love to hear how you’re doing it! Please check out the Post-Click Marketing blog – it’s all about marketing optimization. It’ll have a lot of advice similar to this post. Thanks!