7 Ways to Use SlideShare for Your Business
By David Waring
Published June 5, 2014 
Do you use SlideShare as a marketing tool?
Are you looking for creative ways to use SlideShare for your business?
SlideShare is a great place to promote attractive, useful presentations to get the visibility you need.
In this article you’ll discover how SlideShare can generate free exposure for your business.
Why SlideShare for Your Business?
Most social media marketers are focused on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. But are they missing the boat? Out of all of the social platforms out there, SlideShare is the most overlooked and underutilized.
Since few marketers consistently upload content to SlideShare, there’s much less competition than on the other social channels. In fact, SlideShare is the only major content marketing platform left where you can generate some nice content exposure from day one.
Read on for seven ways you can use SlideShare to get your content in front of more people.
#1: Draw People in With Well-Designed Slides
SlideShare’s audience expects high-quality presentations and rewards them with clicks and views. Right now, the demand for attractive, valuable content isn’t being met.
SlideShare has over 60 million unique visitors a month, generating over 215 million page views. With that kind of traffic, the issue of supply and demand isn’t lack of content—it’s lack of well-designed and useful content.
That represents a great opportunity for small business owners like you. Even if you’re not a designer, you can supply the attractive content the audience expects. The slideshow below has some tips to inspire you.
If you choose a popular topic related to your business and design an appealing (and useful) presentation to upload to SlideShare, you’re very likely to see a few hundred views immediately, even if you don’t promote your slides.
Unless you or your brand is already well-known, that’s likely a few hundred more views than a new Twitter, YouTube or Facebook account would get you.
#2: Rank Higher With Keywords and Phrases
How you use keywords and phrases in your slides can impact your success on SlideShare. As on any other site, users search for what they’re looking for. Make sure they can find you.
While it’s not hard to optimize your slides, many people overlook a few basic tweaks that could help them rank higher overall.
One easy change you can make is to use your keyword as a filename. For example, in order to upload your presentation to SlideShare, you have to save it as a PDF. When you save the PDF, use your keyword as the filename.
Also include your keyword or phrase in the title and description of your presentation, as well as the tags. Make your keyword the first tag for the presentation, and then choose closely related tags to follow.
Use your keyword in the Title, Description and Tags sections.
If you don’t already know how to do keyword research, the video below can help you get started.
SlideShare presentations also tend to rank well in Google, making keywords even more important to your efforts.
#3: Appeal to Readers With How-To Guides
Visual content is hot and it’s not going away. SlideShare is an obvious fit for visual content.
People learn best when they can see what they’re supposed to be doing. Slides make it easy for viewers to see how to complete steps, go at their own pace and jump back and forth as needed.
The presentation below is an example of how one company uses a SlideShare presentation to walk their users through creating a business profile.
A how-to guide on SlideShare lets you avoid overwhelming viewers by giving them information one slide at a time. If viewers get bored, they can quickly flip forward to the part that interests them.
If you’d like, you can upgrade your SlideShare account to include video in your presentation as well.
#4: Grab Attention With List Titles
Readers love lists. If you visit any popular website, you’ll see more than a few headlines that include a list. That’s because they work. The same is true on SlideShare.
In addition to lists, people like to keep up with the influencers in their niche and any changes in who’s considered an influencer.
Take advantage of those two surefire ways of attracting readers: Create a presentation listing the Top 10 People Leading (Your Industry). Or consider taking a new tack and listing the up-and-comers.
With just one list presentation, you can lure readers in and get on the radar of the people who matter in your space. If you’re lucky, they’ll share the presentation with their followers.
For every 10 emails industry influencers get telling them they’ve been listed in a blog post, I bet they don’t even get one telling them they’ve been listed in a SlideShare presentation. Pique their interest by offering something different.
#5: Share Useful Industry Information
White papers put marketers between a rock and a hard place. If your white paper isn’t packed with information, readers don’t think it’s special. If it’s too long, you lose their attention.
Meet readers in the middle with a SlideShare summary. Create slides that include links to relevant sections of your industry white paper so your audience can focus on the areas they’re most interested in.
Use SlideShare to summarize long content.
When you make it easy for viewers to find the information that best pertains to them, they’re more likely to view your presentation and click through to your related content.
#6: Post Presentations to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is fast becoming the go-to spot for business professionals to educate themselves on industry-related topics. That makes it a great place to promote your well-designed, professional SlideShare content.
Anytime you post a presentation on LinkedIn, share it as a status update in both your personal profile and company page.
An example of a SlideShare presentation I shared via a LinkedIn profile.
You can also add your SlideShare content to your LinkedIn profile’s Summary page. Just click Edit on your profile, then click the box with a plus sign beside it and add a link to your slides.
Add slides to your LinkedIn profile summary.
Once you add the link to your presentation, you have an attractive way to stand out from other profiles and encourage people to click through for your content.
Your SlideShare gives your LinkedIn summary extra interest.
Don’t stop with LinkedIn. While you’re sharing your slides, go ahead and hit your other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
#7: Get Featured on the SlideShare Homepage
Each day, SlideShare hand-selects around a dozen presentations to feature on their homepage.
The Featured section of the SlideShare homepage.
As you’d expect, being featured on SlideShare’s homepage results in a lot of additional exposure for your presentation. And guess what? It’s not as hard to get featured as you might imagine.
As I mentioned earlier, SlideShare staff hand-picks which presentations they put on the homepage. There’s no way to game the system. If you follow SlideShare’s guidelines (in the presentation below), you’ll dramatically increase your chances of being noticed.
Editors tend to pick new presentations to feature on the homepage. With this in mind, make sure you post new content early in the day so it has a full day to be seen by viewers and SlideShare’s editors.
Try it Out
Unlike other social platforms that are saturated with competition, SlideShare is still relatively open. With SlideShare you can reach a new audience from the very first day you start using it.
Create an attractive, useful presentation and optimize it for your target audience. Watch the response, then try out some of the other tips in this article to see how they affect your success. As always, use what works.
What do you think? Are you using SlideShare as a marketing tactic? Do you have advice for others who need SlideShare visibility? We want to hear about your experiences. Leave them, along with questions and comments, below.
David Waring is the co-founder of FitSmallBusiness.com a site dedicated to helping small business owners with a local presenceOther posts by David Waring »
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