7 Ways Businesses Can Get More Social With SlideShare

By Ekaterina Walter at Mashable Social Media: 
Online presentation website SlideShare is an important business network that ranks in the top 300 websites, with 30 million monthly viewers, and 80 million pageviews. Users upload presentations, Word and PDF files, tag them, and share them on other social media sites, or embed them in their blogs and company websites.
But SlideShare isn’t just a one-way process: The social functions in the site are giving companies the potential to connect with customers and clients in new ways, generating new business and enhancing their online image.
Here’s how businesses achieve social success using SlideShare.

1. Tell Your Story

For organizations of all sizes, presentations can communicate a company’s ethos far beyond the more traditional LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook routes alone. Presentations make a company more three-dimensional and add personality.
In May 2011 NASA launched its NASA Universe channel on SlideShare, which integrated presentations, documents and videos from NASA headquarters and field centers. In the announcement on the SlideShare blog, NASA social media manager Stephanie Schierholz said, “SlideShare provides us another great way to share our content in new ways and new places with the goal of inspiring and interesting people in the universe.”
Because presentations are generally about very specific topics, companies use SlideShare for inbound marketing, to generate traffic through clients’ and customers’ searches. By sharing SlideShare links, it’s possible to optimize searches by tagging presentations and using the SlideShare profile to link back to the company website.

2. Highlight Your Experts

 

IBM Expert Network is a set of channels that leverages the thought leadership of employees across the company to gain social media engagement. It showcases the latest thinking, research, inspiration videos and more.

3 and 4. Demand Generation and Social Cross-Pollination

We’ve all heard it: What gets measured gets funded. But tracking awareness metrics is one thing; measuring lead capture is something else entirely. Eloqua has an active and creative SlideShare channel – so creative, in fact, that SlideShare features Eloqua’s channel as an example of an effective Platinum page. Through Eloqua’s SlideShare Cloud Connector, the company automatically populates its demand generation database with profile information from anyone who completes a form on its SlideShare channel. It’s one of the ways companies are bringing together social media with demand generation.
Another thing that jumps out about the channel is its social network cross-pollination. The company highlights links to its Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube communities right under the channel description.

5. Share In-Depth Information

 An increasing number of companies are using SlideShare to present financial, technical or other in-depth information that can be difficult to represent on their websites using more traditional tools, such as graphs and text. This enables businesses to connect with potential clients in a whole new way.

Pfizer uses SlideShare to post its financial reporting and other presentations, which allow interested parties to access information in a user-friendly format

6. Spark Conversations

Brand management company 1000 Heads specializes in managing what others say about brands. The company uses SlideShare’s social tools and community section to spark conversations with users who comment on, embed or share presentations from their clients, which helps them to reach and engage whole new audiences.

7. Upscale exposure

If a webinar or conference presentation reached only a few thousand people in its original format, posting online through SlideShare can create a multiplier effect. Distilled‘s Tom Critchlow initially presented a webinar to a few thousand people, but after posting on SlideShare, received over 30,000 views.
Have you used SlideShare? Do you find it a visually pleasing and useful tool?