Slideshare: The B2B Social Media Powerhouse

10 Actionable B2B Slideshare Marketing Tactics

Slideshare is B2B social media’s biggest secret. As one of my clients confided, don’t let everyone know about Slideshare’s power. It yields more high quality views and leads than his content did in its original format. That’s powerful.

Slideshare, purchased by LinkedIn earlier this year, receives 60M visitors per month. More importantly, these visitors tend to be highly influential business people seeking to engage with relevant content.

Many marketers don’t think much about Slideshare beyond it being a place to post presentations. They miss the power of Slideshare, which in the words of Joe Chernov of Eloqua, is the trifecta of effective content marketing: content, community and data.

Still not convinced? Check out this case study from B2B marketer Marketo, presented by Maria Pergolino at Content Marketing World.  Marketo’s marketing team converted a white paper to a Slideshare presentation, How to Build a Better Inbound Marketing Machine, resulting in 145K shares, significantly more than it had as a plain vanilla white paper. Actionable Marketing Tip: Adapt your content and related design to meet the requirements of each specific platform.

10 Actionable Slideshare marketing tactics

So how do you take advantage of Slideshare’s power to generate leads? How do you use it to make sales and grow your B2B business?

As with any other social media venue, consider your business goals and specifically your social media and content marketing objectives. (BTW–Here are 15 additional SlideShare Content Marketing tips to help guide your use of the platform.)

  1. Know your target audience on Slideshare. Like other social media entities, Slideshare is an effective way to target content to specific audiences. For help, develop a marketing persona and a social media persona.
  2. It isn’t just a presentation ghetto. Limiting your Slideshare content to only presentations reduces its potential value for your business. The site can host any content format – text, video, infographics, audio, and, of course, presentations.
  3. Broaden your reach by using hashtags. Add relevant hashtags to your presentation to attract a wider audience. The top six hashtags on Slideshare are #business, #statistics, #socialmedia, #market, #trend and #research. Like other social media venues, it’s not good form to go overboard with hashtags. Limit your use to three. (Here’s some related information on hashtags.)
  4. Employ Slideshare to brainstorm new content. Peruse other business’ work to get ideas and inspiration.
  5. Adapt your visual presentation to fit Slideshare’s platform. Don’t think one size fits all with Slideshare. It makes your content look like the backup date who got asked less than a hour before the event. Adjust your content to maximize your impact on Slideshare.
  6. Optimize your Slideshare Title and thumbnail for search. Bear in mind that Slideshare attracts search traffic. The goal is to support getting your presentation found by your key target audience. Further, by using the appropriate keywords, you can see how your competitors measure up.
  7. Stake out your competitive turf. As Slideshare continues to grow, it’s important to have a presence on this social media entity to be on a parity with what your competitors are doing.
  8. Promote your Slideshare presence. Leverage your internal media to raise visibility for your presentations. Think in terms of using your website, email, blog, and other social media presences.
  9. Generate leads using Slideshare. Understand that Slideshare visitors like to stay on Slideshare so don’t force them to leave the site to get your information or to sign up for a newsletter. Therefore, capture as little info as possible because the abandonment rate on Slideshare is high. Include quick and easy sign-ups for recurring activity such as newsletters. Joe Chernov recommends what he calls the Jewish Mother Slideshare Strategy. If you liked this preso, we’d really like you to complete this form.
  10. Track results on Slideshare. As with any marketing initiative, it’s critical to measure your results back to your goals. Use Slideshare’s analytics (Note: There’s a monthly fee). Also, incorporate direct links in your presentations. For example, research firm, Altimeter gets most of its leads through Slideshare.

Slideshare is taking off as a B2B social media platform that feeds on content. It’s critical to start building out your Slideshare presence and learn how it engages with your target audience.

Have you used Slideshare? If so, what were your results? What would you recommend to others?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen


Note: This article was inspired by Todd Wheatland and Joe Chernov’s presentation at Content Marketing World in Columbus in September.

Want more in-depth information on Slideshare? Check out Todd Wheatland’s book, The Marketer’s Guide to Slideshare.

Here are some other related articles.

5 Ways social media boosts B2B marketing

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/3929959851/

 

 

 

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