Why SlideShare?
As of late 2013, SlideShare was averaging 60 million visitors a month. We’ve had great success using it—for instance, in just a couple of months one client of ours has reached nearly 30,000 views of a SlideShare we created. It’s an excellent way to expand your social media activities, giving you access to a huge new audience. Through the judicious use of tags, millions more users can find your presentation. Your slides can be embedded into websites and blogs, and are easily shareable on LinkedIn, Twitter and other popular social media platforms. The audience can comment too, giving you a valuable opportunity to engage with them.
It’s very simple to upload onto SlideShare, and if you’ve followed the golden rules of presentations (Three ways to write better presentations) you can have a SlideShare live in minutes just by uploading your existing decks.
Tailoring your content to SlideShare
But don’t just hit “upload”, there are some things to consider with SlideShare that differentiates it from PowerPoint, Prezi, Keynote and other conventional presentation tools.
The default window size is small, so keep content per slide to a minimum to maintain legibility. Also, keep to the 4:3 aspect ratio when setting up your presentation for SlideShare, the wide screen 16:9 format will get cropped.
Any animations or transitions will not work, so if your deck depended heavily on these features you may have extra work to do re-imagining your content. Alternatively you can embed YouTube videos.
There won’t be a presenter either (obviously!) or any audio, and if you loaded the notes with copy to make your slides look clean, all that information will not be in plain sight. The slide should stand alone.
If your original decks use internal hyperlinks to jump between sections, these won’t work—so create your content as a single narrative stream. Other hyperlinks in your presentation should work fine.
Top 5 tips to make a successful SlideShare
- Think about alternative formats. If you’re really brave, make an infographic (which SlideShare supports)—they are liked 5x more than presentations.
- Use eye-catching imagery (which is relevant to the information on the slide!) The brain processes images about 60,000 times faster than text.
- When you’re uploading your SlideShare, don’t forget to tag and add a description to your presentation. 20% of visitors come to SlideShare directly from Google.
- End your presentation with a call to action and contact details. Whether your presentation is selling a product, or just raising your brand profile, this is essential.
- Polish the presentation—before posting it for the world to see, check every detail. Have you used a consistent font, colour scheme and layout? Make sure the images you use are good quality.
SlideShare is a great tool to help your company present information, but it shouldn’t be an afterthought. Instead of just uploading your existing decks, work to optimise them as native SlideShare within the constraints of the platform.
Posted by John on 25 August 2014