5 SlideShare Tips That Increase Reach and Engagement

If you’ve implemented an effective content marketing wheel, you may have received a solid amount of feedback and optimized marketing pieces for your content marketing strategy. And you may be wondering if it’s really necessary to bring another content channel into the mix. Answer: It probably is.

SlideShare has more than 70 million users, most of whom are involved in the B2B community – and this channel gets 500% more traffic from business owners than YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. So even if you’re ticking along with a successful content distribution strategy, it’s worthwhile to consider repurposing strong content for this platform to maximize reach and engagement.

Effective presentations don’t materialize out of a quick effort to drop existing text into a series of slides. To create a truly effective presentation that drives engagement and builds brand loyalty, implement the strategies below.

1. Emphasize data and research

Data-backed presentations not only perform better, they boost your credibility as an expert in the field. By emphasizing data throughout your presentation, you can strengthen your argument and uncover opportunities to highlight trends, make comparisons or predict future outcomes – all of which lend to thought leadership authority.

Effective infographics translate well into a SlideShare presentation because they’ve already been boiled down into key ideas backed by facts and visuals. If you’re repurposing text-based content, make sure it has enough meat – in the form of metrics, statistics, surveys and other data points – to build credibility for your brand.

2. Tell a story with your slides

Information overload is a real thing; the average person processes more than 100,000 digital words on a daily basis. Storytelling has become an indispensable method of communication because it helps tackle the challenges involved with information saturation. Build your slides with storytelling techniques in mind so your presentation stands out as relatable, understandable, and shareable.

As with infographics, a strong story will help you lay out a structure for your presentation. You can arrange key ideas into “chapters” to anchor your content and make it easier for your audience to follow, and fill in the spaces with a logical sequence of data points, facts, concepts and visuals to help drive your main idea.

3. Increase engagement with visuals

It feels easier to deliver information through words, but your audience actually receives your message more effectively when you provide visuals. Our brains can interpret visuals in one-tenth of a second, which means it takes less energy to process your message and your audience will likely stay engaged for a longer period of time.

Look through your content to find opportunities for visual demonstration of data and ideas. Comparisons, percentages, metaphors and other elements lend well to simple graphics that explain your ideas with minimal text on the slide.

An effective SlideShare presentation will also leverage visuals to create stronger brand association. You can do this in two ways:

1. Create a template that aligns with your brand so your audience experience is seamless when they click through to your landing page
2. Develop brand characters that help tell your story in a memorable way, creating an effective emotional attachment to your business

4. Build slides to stand alone

Remember, your SlideShare presentation doesn’t have the advantage of a facilitator to lead your audience through the content. Make sure your slides can independently deliver your message in a way that’s easy to understand.

Avoid cramming complex ideas or excessive detail into your slides – it’s frustrating for your audience, and makes you seem less relatable. If your audience can’t understand your slide through one or two key ideas or visuals, it’s a good sign that you need to break down your outline and simplify your main points even further.

Go through your outline and redline every detail that doesn’t directly contribute to your key idea. Then, break your presentation out to include one easily digestible fact or concept per slide. This quick exercise will help you trim the fat off your deck without sacrificing clarity.

5. Optimize content strategy with real-time feedback

SlideShare is technically a social media channel, which means you can gather insights from audience feedback and engagement. Pay attention to any discussion in the comments and interact with your audience to learn how you can optimize future content to provide even more value.

Read more:

• Optimize Engagement: Less is More