Slideshare 101: Why would I use Slideshare?

[Former Member]

Slideshare 101: Why would I use Slideshare?

Slideshare says they are "The World's Largest Community for Sharing Presentations".

While I cannot validate this claim, I have personally used Slideshare heavily to make my decks available to people who attended my sessions or workshops by simply uploading and emailing the link or embedding it into my blogs, e.g. Social Media Day at SAP: The Presentations. My preferred upload format is PDF to protect the original slides from modification.

Here some 101 tips on how to get started on Slideshare and use it to promote your own blog (for free):

• Set up a private or company account (there are 8 options to choose from)
• You have the option to log in with your Facebook account
• Set up your profile with meaningful information (consider your public profile your business card)
  – Provide links to your blog, FB, Twitter accounts (will also show your Tweet stream)
  – Picture & description of your “purpose”
  – Manage notifications
  -  Follow other people, read their uploads and possibly favorite their content (as you look at their uploads)
• Upload presentations or documents (make sure to add descriptions & tags to be "findable" - think SEO) in PDF
• Share privately or publicly
• Link to content on Slideshare from inside your blog – “play the slides" inside the blog post like a YouTube video
• Promote your slide decks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn...you name it

Paid Options

• ŸIf you upgrade to PRO you can upload videos, capture leads, get analytics & branding.  Users I have spoken to have been very complimentary on the service and ROI.

How to Embed a SlideShare Presentation into your Wordpress.com Blog

• In Slideshare, the easiest way is to grab the embed code and paste it into the HTML view of your blog
• You are supposed to be able to just paste the Slideshare URL into a Wordpress blog but that has not worked for me

Last time I uploaded slides to Slideshare, I got a message that I am close to my limit and have to upgrade to PRO soon to upload more. As I currently have 9 uploads, I assume the limit must be 10.

Here some examples of content that makes sense on Slideshare:

• Social Media Resume
• Your Brand on Social Media
• The Rise of the Social Customer by Michael Brito

Any other tips on Slideshare that I missed? Please share!