A Beginner’s Guide to SlideShare Marketing

Presentation sharing website SlideShare this week announced enhanced support for infographics, which is great news for content marketers. But what is SlideShare, and what’s the fuss about it and infographics? Read our guide to find out.

A brief introduction to SlideShare

SlideShare is a popular ‘web 2.0’ website for sharing presentations – simply upload your slides in PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF or OpenOffice format. It’s especially useful because the presentations can then be embedded into any web page, much like a YouTube video. 

Also, like YouTube, SlideShare is almost a social network in its own right. Pages can be optimised for keywords, and there are even some enhanced lead capturing features such as forms that pop up when someone views your presentation. 

Why is SlideShare popular with content marketers? 

SlideShare was bought by LinkedIn in May last year, a very natural fit as both have B2B and professional networking appeal, with very similar – if not identical – audiences. In short, LinkedIn pages can now be enhanced with SlideShare presentations.

Marketers wishing to reach out to professionals do well to upload interesting presentations or slides from webinars, which can then be embedded into blog articles, thus extending the life of content and adding extra value to broader campaigns. You can see an example from our very own SlideShare account, showing slides from our Content Marketing and Customer Personas webinar.

There are also plenty of useful analytics and marketing features, telling you how many people have downloaded your presentations and even the URLs of websites where they’ve been embedded.

What’s all the fuss concerning infographics?

Infographics are very popular with content marketers due to their proven ‘shareability’. People love to retweet, share, comment on and blog about infographics because of the highly visual and creative way they portray information that would normally be hard to grasp. 

The terms infographic and data visualisation are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences. The former can be quite broad and more informational than number-based, whereas the latter are like charts but more creative, often helping the reader to put complex data into perspective. 

SlideShare has made the very smart move of allowing people to upload and embed such infographics. Technically this was possible before, but the landscape dimensions of the SlideShare window weren’t perfectly suited to infographics which are (typically) not only portrait, but very long as well, requiring much downward scrolling. 

To wrap things up, here’s a great example from our Inbound Marketing partners HubSpot: