There are many ways to market your brand on the social web. You can create videos, host webinars, write ebooks, or chat on social networks. One marketing tool that is often overlooked, however, is the PowerPoint presentation.
That’s right, our old friend Mr. PowerPoint. If you don’t have time to make a fancy video or write an ebook, then maybe you should just make an outline of what you want to convey to your readers. Throw a few interesting graphs up with some pictures and you’ve got yourself a nice slideshow for your audience.
SlideShare is great for this. Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and Word documents to be viewed and shared with their online community. Let’s go over some of the benefits to using SlideShare:
Sharing Your Slides
Making things sharable is what allows for your content to go main stream and find a lot of viewers. Once uploaded, your presentation is a part of the community on SlideShare. Your slides can be favorited, downloaded, emailed, and—most importantly—embedded.
That’s right; your presentation can be embedded all over the web. Take a look at this nice presentation I found on SlideShare:
SlideShare supports both WordPress and Blogger blogs for embedding their content. Presentations can also be shared on social networking sites, which brings me to my next point…
Getting Social
While viewing a slideshow on SlideShare’s website, you have the option of posting it to your Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz accounts.
I know what you’re thinking. “What’s the big deal Steve?” Well, posting to your social accounts can have a positive impact for you. Driving traffic allows your view count to go up on SlideShare, thus making your presentation more popular in the community.
As you might imagine, the more popular your slides are the easier it will be for users to find them on the website.
One popular place for posting SlideShare presentations is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional community and since slide presentations have more of a corporate feel to them this might be the perfect place for you to reach your target audience.
LinkedIn has a SlideShare presentation app that allows you to post your slideshows right to your LinkedIn page for all to see. I’ve seen a lot of people utilize this tool to market their brand.
Searchability
I know ‘searchability’ isn’t a real word, but let’s roll with it anyway. One key thing to think about is that your presentations are searchable within SlideShare. This means that people can find your content simply by going to the website and typing in what they’re looking for in the search box.
So remember to title your presentations properly. Utilize keywords to allow people to find your slides more easily.
Conclusion
Like I said, if you don’t have the time to make a video or write an entire ebook, creating a slideshow can help you market your brand effectively online. Even if you do have videos and ebooks maybe it would be a good idea to summarize them using SlideShare to increase visibility.
Whatever you end up using it for, SlideShare can be a useful marketing tool for you. Be sure to include your contact information in your slides so people can find you!
What do you think about using SlideShare for brand marketing? Will you be adding this tool to your arsenal? Leave some thoughts in the comment section below!
Image Credit: cfi02