Find out how SlideShare can market and grow your business through sharing presentations, optimisation and lead generation. SlideShare is the understated business tool that is quietly emerging from its perceived use as a PowerPoint presentation platform into a powerfully diverse way to showcase a business, its brand and content to an advanced and educated audience. The business case for using SlideShare • The platform has over 60 million unique visits per month • It has over 130 million page views • Over 10 million presentations have been uploaded to the platform • It is among the top 200 most visited websites on the internet.

1. How Sharing Presentations on Slideshare
Can Market & Grow Your Business
Find out how SlideShare can market and grow your business through sharing presentations,
optimisation and lead generation. SlideShare is the understated business tool that is quietly emerging
from its perceived use as a PowerPoint presentation platform into a powerfully diverse way to showcase
a business, its brand and content to an advanced and educated audience.
Acquired by the ever evolving LinkedIn in March 2012, SlideShare maintains a huge focus on presenting
professional content in innovative ways thereby enabling access to business thought leaders and their
valuable content. Professionals use SlideShare to seek and share business information and inspiration.
The business case for using SlideShare
 The platform has over 60 million unique visits per month
 It has over 130 million page views
 Over 10 million presentations have been uploaded to the platform
 It is among the top 200 most visited websites on the internet.
Getting started on SlideShare
When setting up a Slideshare Account , the platform requires very little information:
 Enter a Username
 Enter a Password
 Enter a valid Email Address
 Enter the Verification Text
 Check the “I accept the TOS & Privacy Policy” box
 Click on Sign Up
The most difficult part is in deciding whether to use the basic account or upgrade to one of the paid levels
of subscription.
The levels consist of:
 Basic
 Silver
 Gold
 Platinum

2. Whilst all levels allow for presentation upload there are differences in the availability of key features of
SlideShare such as analytics and lead generation that can play a huge part in business optimization.
SlideShare features
 Uploads – SlideShare has shaken off the perception of only being used for PowerPoint presentations
and can now showcase a diversity of mediums:
 PowerPoint – Yes, PowerPoint is still there and working as well as ever! Remember to share your
website url at the start and end of presentations.
 YouTube – A YouTube video can be embedded into a presentation at any slide point.
 Audio - An audio track mp3 url can be recorded and used as an overlay to a presentation to create
webcasts and recorded lectures.
 Documents and Infographics - Use Open Office, MS Office, iworks docs, PDF’s as well as
infographics on SlideShare. The use of visual images at the start of text documents will make them more
appealing.
 Meetings - Zipcast allows for public or private meetings using slides, audio and chat functions. These
can be public or made private as preferred.
TIP: Create an impact with your presentations by ensuring they are highly visual with streamlined text and
… not too long!
SlideShare: The business benefits
Incorporating SlideShare into a business strategy has many benefits for a business. The benefits can be
derived from within the SlideShare community itself or by the optimization of content and its ability to be
shared throughout the digital spectrum.
SlideShare community

3. The majority of the SlideShare community is made up of professionals, business people and thought
leaders. The six most used tags on SlideShare are business, market, trends, research, social media, and
statistics. This indicates that a business has a much greater opportunity to interact and communicate
with like-minded individuals and share ideas and gain best practice.
[Ref: How To Be Awesome On Slideshare from Jesse Desjardins - @jessedee]
As well as gaining information, SlideShare can create opportunities. Jesse Desjardins used SlideShare to
articulate how it managed to get him three ‘gigs’ from one presentation proving that, as well as increasing
brand awareness, the platform can also generate a return on investment (ROI).
Interaction on SlideShare
SlideShare is no different to most platforms in its high level ranking algorithms; namely the more valuable
content generated and uploaded and the more activity on the platform, the more likely your business is to
be seen.
Once you have created an account on SlideShare you can choose to follow other accounts that provide
interesting content. They can also then choose to follow your account. This interaction increases the level
of followers ensuring that your content gets to be seen.
SlideShare follows a similar format to Facebook in that posts/content can be liked and commented on.
This engagement as well as shares from your followers again increases the visibility of your content.
SEO
A fundamental reason for a business being online is to drive traffic to view the products and services your
business has to offer. A business can optimize search by:
 Ensuring the title page is optimized with strong keywords.
 Using key words within the content of the presentation as well as the description and tags.
 Using a call to action or a call to more content.
TIP: A trick is to display some of the content on SlideShare and invite the user to view the rest on your site.
Social sharing
SlideShare content can be shared on other Social Media platforms such
as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

4. What most business users miss though, is the opportunity to have a SlideShare link on their website.
Users can be so busy trying to drive people to their website to view content; they forget the importance of
using SlideShare as a content provider in its own right. In a Social Media Examiner podcast, Todd
Wheatland tells Michael Stelzner that he has seen businesses gain hundreds of targeted followers through
having a SlideShare widget on their site.
TIP: Each time your slides are embedded to another site it counts as an inbound link.
Business branding
With the paid subscription option, SlideShare PRO, a business can brand their SlideShare account so that
it is presented as an extension of their website.
There are other factors to consider with regards to branding:
 For visual attraction and appeal, your title page should be eye catching and incorporate your brand
values.
 There should be branding consistency throughout the presentation. Have you designed a customized
business template for this?
Lead generation
LeadShare is a fantastic function that is underutilized by business on SlideShare. With a PRO subscription,
accounts can generate leads or grow subscriber lists by incorporating a lead generation form into their
presentation.
[Ref: Leadshare from SlideShare Help]
The forms can be customized to incorporate a business need.
Examples of these business needs are:
 Inviting a user to join a mailing list for future news
 Asking a user if they would like to be contacted about a product or service
 Asking for feedback through surveys
 Event RSVPs
The LeadShare form can also be used on embedded sites.

5. Once the form has been filled in the information can be accessed via the PRO dashboard and will also be
emailed to you.
This is a great way of enabling direct contact with potential customers to your business.
Send Tracker
Incorporating both targeted lead generation with high level analytics; SendTracker is a proactive tool to
generate strategic leads and analyse the result of the direct contact.
The PRO subscription tool can:
- Allow a business to send a new or existing presentation to a potential customer via email.
- They can then track in real time:
 When the email was opened
 How long they viewed your content
 How long was spent on each slide
 Each time your content is viewed
This valuable information increases business efficiency as it allows a business to spend more time
focusing on leads that have shown interest in the content rather than expending time on a broad data
base of prospects.
Business metrics
With a PRO account a business has access to detailed performance metrics for their content.
The Key Performance Indicators include:
 Number of views
 Number of Downloads
 Number of Tweets and Facebook likes
As well as this you can drill further and view:
 Metrics by Presentation
 ISP address
 City and Country
 Referring URL
 Recent tweets mentioning your content
 Who is downloading your content
This information will enable a business to assess what works well with the most popular presentations
and readjust or strengthen their strategy accordingly.
Do you use SlideShare for your business? Tell us how it works for you.

6. Understanding the Digital Economy
Reports:
 E-Commerce
 Food and Drink Sector
 International Student Recruitment
 General and Health Insurance
 FMCG Sector – Retail and Ecommerce
 Attracting Top Tier Talent
 Social Media in Politics
Guides:
 Social Media Strategy
 Blogging
 SEO
 Facebook
 Facebook local search
 LinkedIn
 Twitter
 YouTube
 Foursquare
 Google Analytics
 Pinterest
 Instagram
 Adwords
 Google+
 Klout
 SMS Marketing
 Mobile Commerce
 Infographics
 Hootsuite
 BizSugar
Contact us
If you would like to talk to The Ahain Group about SlideShare please feel free to contact us.
Connect:
Email: info@ahaingroup.com
Address: Unit 206 | NSC Campus | Mahon | Cork | Ireland