Slideshare may be new to the game, but the value offered through this social platform is through the roof, especially if the presentation you create is valuable, organized, and provides your viewers with quality content to engage.
But if you’ve tried Slideshare before and didn’t get the desired results, don’t quit just yet. There are many ways to alter your strategy to help jumpstart results.
What Can I Do To Get More Slideshare Views?
To start, you could format your presentations for visual finesse and content clarity. You need your Slideshare to stand out from the millions of other presentations hosted through the site. In the last quarter of 2013, Slideshare averaged over 60 million unique visitors a month (with 215 million page views). The viewers are there—you just need to figure out how to garner their attention.
Create Compelling Title Slides:
Your title slide is the first slide your visitors will see. Make it count. It only takes a couple seconds for us to make an opinion about something—even if we’re wrong. That’s the power of first impressions.
Your title slide needs to be clear and uncluttered, starting with the actual title. Pick a title that gets people excited about your topic without misleading them. And remember, your title slide may look good full screen, but most Slideshare visitors will see it as a small 300x300 square, so don’t fill it with unnecessary information. A strong bold title and powerful imagery go a long way.
Build Sharable Content:
Not all Slideshares were created equal. In fact, most are terrible. Who wants to stare at 35 fluorescent white slides with nothing but a black book of text overtop? No one, that’s who. Formatting your presentation in small, visual chunks is the best approach we’ve found.
This keeps your viewers engaged longer and makes your content easier to read and understand. And if you find yourself getting bored, change your strategy because if it’s boring, it won’t get shared. Once you understand Slideshare brings in 500 percent more traffic from business owners than the other major players (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn), I’m sure you’ll revise the quality of your content pretty quickly.
Fill Your Presentation With Links:
Just like blogging, your presentations need linking strategies. Whether that means sourcing material from another company, or inserting CTAs to help drive traffic back to your own website or company blog, links are important parts of building out your content. They also help to extend the lifespan of your presentation indefinitely.
All you need to do is link text through PowerPoint or create clickable fields inside the working PDF of your presentation. This gives viewers an opportunity to connect with your brand and move their relationship forward through actionable buttons that lead them where you want them to be, whether that’s straight to your homepage, or a landing page that’s able to capture their information and convert them into leads.
Change Up Your Strategy:
The great thing about SlideShare is, once you hit publish, you still have the opportunity to change your presentation. Yes, you’ll have to re-upload it, but it will keep the same view count, comments, shares, etc. as before.
Why is this important, you may wonder? It helps you test which aspects of your presentation work and which don’t in order to understand the type and style of content that delights your followers. Title slide isn’t working out? Change it. Old, outdated content? Throw in some new information. Too much content? Slim it down to the main points. There’s always an opportunity for more views—you just need to understand what gets you those views in the first place.
Our Own Slideshare Experience
We wouldn’t sit here spouting off Slideshare best practices if we didn’t attempt them ourselves! Our latest Slideshare, 11 Inspirational Quotes from the Top CEOs of the Modern Business World utilized these best practices and more to create a remarkable piece of content that people actively searched for and engaged.
We created a compelling title slide that utilized popular search terms and keywords to drive organic traffic to our presentation. Next, we made the actual title bold and easy to read. It needed to be engaging enough to get visitors to interact through a thumbnail, after all. We also made sure the presentation was prime for sharing, so we included a variety of CEO personalities to keep the list diverse and interesting no matter what your background was.
We made sure the slides could stand alone, too, so you could download them and print them out individually if you wanted to. Along with our own linking strategies and CTAs, these efforts came together to create a winning presentation. We were even featured as Slideshare's Presentation of the Day, which we were stoked about. In fact, we stayed on the homepage for about a week after which was huge for our page views, which reached 80,000 in about a week.
