Tuesday, May 15, 2012

8 Ways to Get the Biggest Marketing Bang Out of SlideShare

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Salesforce.com’s Jennifer Burnham calls it, “a library in the cloud.” JESS3 co-founder, Jesse Thomas describes it as, “Wikipedia mixed with Delicious and Vimeo.” However you want to characterize SlideShare, remember this: It’s big. More than nine million uploads big. Twenty-nine million monthly unique visitors big. And, according to LinkedIn, $119 million big.

Yet, despite its sharp growth and high-profile acquisition, many marketers are unsure of what to do on SlideShare beyond uploading PowerPoints. The social platform is much more than the Web’s largest archive of presentations, PDFs, and videos. It’s also a vibrant, mobile-friendly, Google-indexed community frequented by reporters, buyers, and senior executives. Here are eight ways savvy social marketers can take advantage of that.

1. An SEO End-Around


SEO is one of the biggest cost centers in marketing, and with good reason. Studies show that Google users click page-one results 88% more often than page-two results. But in SlideShare’s case, search engines index “notes” text, which means popular, keyword-optimized presentations often rise to the top of results pages. Edelman’s EVP, David Armano, refers to this as, “a great way to own a thought.”

2. A Surprising Source of Referral Traffic


While SlideShare may not rival FacebookTwitter, or LinkedIn in referral traffic, it’s clearly the thickest segment of the SEO tail. For example, SlideShare refers more traffic to our company than Google+ and YouTube, combined. Jay Baer, co-author of The NOW Revolution reminds clients, “No matter how many visitors your website has, SlideShare has a lot more.”

3. A Bridge to Press and Bloggers


People tend to trust content they discover organically more than they do content hosted on a corporate homepage. Todd Wheatland, head of global marketing at Kelly Services, believes journalists are more willing to embed a SlideShare file because they perceive it as a “neutral platform.” Salesforce.com’s Burnham adds, “SlideShare works great as embedded media in a promoted Tweet on your branded Twitter page.” This is part of why she equips company bloggers with SlideShare embeds.

4. A Hub for Leads


Unlike many social channels, the impact of SlideShare can be tracked all the way into the proverbial “sales funnel.” Premium users can insert forms into their presentations, allowing them to know exactly who downloaded a file. Andrea Soltysiak, director of global marketing at Ariba, integrated SlideShare into her marketing automation and CRM systems, which allowed her to capture new sales leads and automatically route them to the sales department. Ariba generated more than 1,000 leads in three weeks of experimenting with this solution.


Tips 5 - 8 and complete Mashable article


Joe Chernov is the vice president of content marketing forEloqua. He is responsible for creating, distributing, and measuring content that increases awareness and drives demand. Follow him @jchernov.

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