Should You Include SlideShare in your B2B Content Strategy?

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Image credit: Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

Many B2B businesses anchor their content strategies around three major platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. This approach is understandable considering that these platforms are trusted by marketers to provide a strong ROI. However, as every good content marketer knows – diversity of content is key. Businesses should consistently be on the lookout for new platforms to incorporate into their  content distribution strategies as a means of increasing their online presence and ultimately generating more leads. With 58 million unique visitors each month, SlideShare is a great visual platform for B2B businesses looking to diversify their content rota.

What is SlideShare? 

SlideShare is a slide hosting service used primarily by business professionals. The company was founded in 2006 by Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle, who wanted to create an online community where employees could share visual presentations with their colleagues quickly and easily. “As with video, where early entrepreneurs recognized that asynchronous sharing on the web could work, we realized with presentations that it was time to move beyond in-person presentations and that you could share slides on the web. Others could comment, favorite, download and build on this,” Sinha explains. SlideShare has steadily gained traction in the professional world since it was founded in 2006, leading to its acquisition by LinkedIn in 2012 for roughly $118 million USD.

SlideShare currently attracts an estimated 58 million unique users each month. And with approximately 16 million registered users, including the White House, NASA, HP, IBM and Arianna Huffington, SlideShare has become a powerful platform for sharing PowerPoints, PDFs, infographics and webinars. Its CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha has been named amongst the top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by FastCompany.

Benefits for B2b Businesses

Access a Wider Audience – A key aspect of content marketing is accommodating for the fact that not all prospects are active on all platforms. Beyond that, not all prospects will engage with content in the same way. That is why it is important for content marketers to distribute their content on as many platforms as is practical to attract more leads. For B2B companies, this means being on platforms that have primarily a professional audience, such as SlideShare. The site’s professional user base and use by an array of multinational companies and key industry players gives it a distinct advantage over its competitors, such as Scribd or edocr.com.

Sharability – Creating a SlideShare presentation automatically gives you access to the platform’s native user base, which means that – with a captivating title and strong imagery – your SlideShares could attract hundreds of views from SlideShare alone and even end up on the homepage reel. But perhaps more importantly, in addition to your presentation being viewable on the platform itself, the tool also gives you the option to easily share your slides on your social media accounts and/or embed them onto your site.

This is beneficial for B2B businesses whose inbound marketing strategy centres around driving traffic to their site. Warming prospects to your content via third-party platforms such as LinkedIn or SlideShare is great for nurturing those that are at the top of your funnel. But, to convert prospects into paying customers it is vital to drive them to spend time on your site where they can subscribe to your mailing list, access further resources and e-book, and read deeper about your company’s services.