HOW TO : As a Company/Business make best use of SlideShare
by Royston Olivera on Dec.13, 2009, under Social Media
In my 1st post on SlideShare, I tried giving a low down on what SlideShare has in store for all and why it becomes an upcoming Social Media channel. In this post, I will try and put together a set of steps that businesses/companies could follow to make the best use of SlideShare to share information and their branding.
Create your Profile…
You need to start off by first creating your account and selecting the appropriate Account Type. For a business it would mostly be “company”, unless your a Marketing/PR firm or a Non-Profit who have their specific account types. Once you have confirmed your account, login and complete your profile by giving the description of your company, uploading your logo and entering the tags that best describe your company and the work done. It would be best to fill in every information in a detailed manner, as that is what people are going to look at first when they stumble upon your company on SlideShare.
Upload Great Content…
Now its time to dig out all the content(Tuesday TechTalk slides, White papers written by your employees, presentations that you made to your clients) that your company has generated over the years and is just lying under virtual dust in your Content Management System and post it to SlideShare. Any content that you think would be of great help to others and could draw some eyeballs to your account is a good post. Post content that acts as a proof to the profile information that you provided. Remember we are trying to use SlideShare not only as a knowledge sharing medium but also for your branding, so before you upload your content you need to dress it up.
- Design 1 or 2 good templates and push your presentations in these templates before uploading them to SlideShare. By doing this people who have already viewed and liked some of your presentations before will be able to identify your other presentations in the search listings and prefer to pick them over others.
- Let the first slide of your presentations have the company logo, authors name and company website along with the subject of the presentation.
- Make sure your template has your company logo and/or your company name in the footnote on every slide, certifying that the content is yours and at the same time giving it a professional look.
- The last slide of each presentation could have a citation to the author, when and where was this presented, a link to the blog or document that briefly describes this presentation and the email id for feedback or more information on this presentation.
Publish your presentations with the appropriate title, description and tags so that people get a good idea of the presentation before they scan it slide-by-slide.
Socialize…
SlideShare provides quiet a few social networking features that would help you build your social graph. Start of by searching for people and company profiles in your field and start following them. Review their content and provide them with feedback, favorite presentations that you really liked, comment on them, provide them with a link to your own presentations on the same topic and ask for feedback. Basically you need to start a conversation, social media is all about starting a conversation, collaborating with people and building communities.
Share your Content…
Socializing within SlideShare is a good thing to do, but you can even attract people from outside SlideShare by embedding and sharing your presentations on blogs and other social networking platforms. Make sure that you blog about each of your presentation giving in-depth explanation of your presentation and using the embed code provided by SlideShare to embed your presentation in your blog post. SlideShare has even built apps. on Facebook and LinkedIn, so you could even add these apps to display your content on your companies profile or fan page on these social networks.
One of my personal favorite offerings from SlideShare are their wide range of widgets and presentation playlists that you can embed on your blog and website to display a feed of your presentations.
SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them, but I would recommend to go for this only after you have built a good profile by following the above few steps.
The above steps provided by me are by no means exhaustive, there would be many other ways by which you could make use of SlideShare as a social media channel to promote your company and its work.
How are you using SlideShare to promote your business? Share it with me in the comments 
December 14th, 2009 on 6:49 AM
Royston, you have a refreshing take on how Companies can leverage their intellectual property to effect on niche networks like Slideshare. Good, pls keep more of these insightful observations coming.
December 14th, 2009 on 7:24 AM
Thanks Akshay
December 21st, 2009 on 8:31 AM
Hi Royston,
This is a very good step by step guide on how to use slideshare to promote a business, we are doing the same at our company. we have many many presentations that as u said are under dust for years, we are creating a list of all these documents to add them to our Slideshare account, and we have enbeded Slideshare into our Facebook and Linkedin accounts. and for the few documents i have already posted on our company slideshare we have reiceved more than 100 views which shows that people are looking for such documents. our account name is CERTPOINT.
December 21st, 2009 on 9:58 AM
Hi Armen,
Thanks for dropping by and hope this post has added value to your companies social media strategy. It is true that your content gets a lot of views on SlideShare and that adds to your branding.
It would even be great if you could share any more creative ways that your team has followed for posting to SlideShare. It would help others that read read this post
-Royston