In this Forbes article, the magazine called Slideshare, the web’s leading slide-hosting service site, the “Quiet Giant of Content Marketing”.
They have a point.
The constant search for new ways to enhance B2B lead generation has been a major headache for marketers since the beginning, and they’ve found gems in videos, e-newsletters, blogs and infographics, and now, they’re leaning on using online slides.
SlideShare has been generally considered as the world’s largest professional content sharing community. “With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world,” the article further claimed.
David Brier, an award-winning branding expert and blogger, shared his insight on why Slideshare is such a hit among brands and marketers. For him, SlideShare is “pretty unrivaled in being targeted to professionals seeking content and information whereas YouTube is essentially for video entertainment.”
Indeed, the very concept of slides not only organizes content systematically, but it also gives full control to the reader, given how slides naturally operate. “It is a blank canvas so just as brands have turned YouTube into a vehicle for their brand, the same could be done on SlideShare,” Brier added.
Does it work?
Slideshare is owned by LinkedIn; therefore their potential for business exposure is unparalleled. One can link a Slideshare account with his or her LinkedIn account so that all Slideshare presentation are shared on LinkedIn automatically. According to ComScore, Slideshare has around five times as much traffic from business owners as Twitter or Facebook.
Slides make the content presentation more impactful by collecting all the vital details and staging at as a creative piece of visual content. While infographics are limited to their typical templates of charts, graphs and icons, slides have practically no limit – in terms of placing photos, the length of text, or how extensive the presentation is.
This makes lead generation and thought-leadership much easier for marketers because viewers can easily capture the message and even share it with peers. In a Content Marketing Institute blog, Slideshare solutions consultant Kevin Fisher explained that slides can be embedded just about anywhere online, which extends their reach far beyond the limitations of a website. “Most marketers don’t realize this, but you can embed a presentation in a tweet,” he said. “You’ve just turned your Twitter account into an effective lead gen tool. Your target audience doesn’t even have to leave the site.”
There are a lot of other ways a marketer can take advantage of Slideshare to achieve the desired numbers their business needs. As a relatively young medium, who knows how more powerful it would be in the years to come.