Are you using LinkedIn SlideShare as a social media marketing option?
Are you using LinkedIn SlideShare presentations to market your business?
Have you considered Linked In SlideShare as a conversion tool?
LinkedIn SlideShare is useful for sharing highly informative presentations with your audience, but it’s also a hot social platform. Many businesses are missing out on the huge potential of SlideShare as a social marketing and lead conversion tool.
In this article you’ll discover four simple ways to use LinkedIn SlideShare to improve your marketing and lead generation.
Why LinkedIn SlideShare?
LinkedIn owns SlideShare, which means the platforms work seamlessly together – in fact they've recently updated the name to LinkedIn SlideShare and switched to the LinkedIn logo. By participating on LinkedIn SlideShare, you have an important connection with the biggest professional social media platform. If you want to show your expertise in your industry and become a thought leader, the LinkedIn/SlideShare combination is an undeniable powerhouse.
Sign up for LinkedIn SlideShare Pro at no cost. Beyond just uploading static presentation slides, you can also upload video—a perfect opportunity for repurposing webinars or company videos.
You can even upload content that you make available only to a select audience. Just share the link with your VIP customers and they’ll have access to your exclusive content.
LinkedIn SlideShare analytics offer insights into what’s working and what’s not, so you can adjust your marketing appropriately.
An important feature of any platform you work with is analytics—the dread and delight of all social media marketers. With LinkedIn SlideShare’s analytics, you can find out which presentations are most popular and enhance those with additional conversion options.
#1: Collect Emails From Viewers
LeadGen is LinkedIn SlideShare’s way of allowing you to collect the emails of people who download your presentations. You can simply insert lead capture forms within presentations, documents and video.
From LinkedIn SlideShare, “Lead Generation on SlideShare allows individuals and businesses to capture lead information via lead forms added to their content uploaded on SlideShare. Leads can be collected via all content formats supported by SlideShare.
- For content supported by Slideshare, lead forms can be placed in a number of locations, as decided by the uploader and triggered when:
- A reader tries to download the content
- A reader reaches the end of the content
- A reader reaches a certain slide (not supported on video)
- A reader clicks on the Learn more button
- The form supports mobile and web platforms on SlideShare.com. It also can be embedded on third party websites and social networks.”
For example, you can set your contact form to show while a user is looking at your slides. The contact form will show up after the tenth slide, at the end of the deck or via a permanent display button on the slide player.
LeadShare makes it easy to collect emails from viewers.
And the best part? If you embed your LinkedIn SlideShare deck on your website or other social networks, the contact form remains intact.
Another option is to set your form to show when a user downloads your original presentation or PDF file.
Regardless of which method you use, you can see your lead captures in the LeadShare section of your Pro Dashboard. As an added bonus, the information is also emailed to you.
To capture the most leads, upload content to LinkedIn SlideShare on a regular basis and make sure your lead form shows on your download.
#2: Include Links in Slides
If you want to move people to your website, lead magnet or contact form, embedded links are key. SlideShare lets you include live links starting on your fourth slide and going all the way through to the end of your presentation.
You can add links to your presentation within PowerPoint or Keynote before you upload your slides.
Including a link in a slide extends your interaction with your audience.
The last page of Uberflip’s clever presentation The Content Marketing Funnel of Love has a Subscribe to Our Hub button at the end. When users click it, they are whisked away to the Uberflip splash page.
Keep your subscription forms short for maximum engagement.
As an aside, I like that the mailing list is easy to sign up for. Uberflip keeps the form short and sweet—users don’t have to jump through a lot of hoops.
By keeping your form questions or requests to a minimum, you’re more likely to get a response.
#3: Add Visual Calls to Action
Your calls to action are what move users to complete your targeted task. You can’t be subtle and expect to get clicks. Be loud and clear—use graphics such as arrows and buttons combined with text to ask for the click-through.
Jesse Desjardin’s popular LinkedIn SlideShare Why You Suck at PowerPoint has three different asks on the final slide. He asks viewers to share the presentation, download the presentation and tweet it out. If he’s wanting to get the word out, it’s working—this LinkedIn SlideShare presentation has almost two million views!
Bring attention to your calls to action by using visual graphics and call-outs.
If you didn’t use clear calls to action in your previously uploaded presentations, don’t sweat it.LinkedIn SlideShare is the only platform that allows you to update your posts without losing the social sharing counts and views.
It’s worth taking the time to go back and update your old presentations with visual calls to action and links.
#4: Create an Enticing Description
The description you use for your LinkedIn SlideShare presentation is just as important as your slides, links, calls to action and contact forms.
What you write here not only helps users, but also it’s important for SEO. Ann Smarty says, “The text you include here is what the search engines see. What you say and how you say it can improve your LinkedIn SlideShare natural rankings dramatically.”
Within the description, you can include links to your company website, blog or email sign-up form. But don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to the usual links—point people where you want them to go. For example, I linked my Pinterest SlideShare to both a pin and my website.
Provide links in your SlideShare description to lead viewers to further information.
Many companies are ignoring the opportunity to enhance their descriptions for SEO and other important factors. Don’t make the same mistake!
Over to You
Think ABC: Always Be Converting. While the usual suspects—your website, Facebook, etc.—are important, don’t discount LinkedIn SlideShare. It offers an often-overlooked lead gathering opportunity.
You can present your valuable content in an interesting way to a new audience,watch how it performs and tempt your new audience to connect with you.
Maximizing your content’s effectiveness by creating LinkedIn SlideShare presentations is something wise social media marketers will be taking advantage of. It can be fun too.
What do you think? Do you use LinkedIn SlideShare to gather leads? What tactics have worked best for you? Please leave your comments and questions below.
Great post, Peg. Thank you for this.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Scott!
Excellent, we always think that we know every thing about social media, how to use them, but in fact, we just know why they are here for, rarely how to really take benefits and advantages for our business !
Glad you liked it! Have you been trying out SlideShare?
Yes, I do when I was working as IT sales ; I noticed that slideshare has more functionalities and that it’s much more easier to get in touch with prospects and get feedbacks ; and by now, I’m interesting in all what have relation with social media and how to use them effectively to grow presence in the websphere.
Very cool! I think there are a lot of aspects of SlideShare that people overlook. They are also great to add to your LinkedIn profile in the summary section.
very nice post peg i enjoyed your all posts. you write many times about for using slideshare. i have a question how to live link in slideshare description?
Peg, great article thanks for sharing it. When I clicked the leadshare link, I got the following message: “Accessing the LeadShare Feature in SlideShare – No Longer Supported… Beginning in June, 2015, access to LeadShare will be discontinued and replaced by Led Generation. Learn more about this new feature to continue generating leads.”