Why is SlideShare important?

Most of us have used the presentation sharing services of SlideShare. I used it a lot during my MBA days when the life objective used to be to make as many Power point presentations as humanly possible and to present them to faculty in order to get good grades for the assignments. Many of us have also taken inspiration (read : copied) from the valuable content on multitude of subjects.

Working professionals, apart from the students, are another major consumer set for the SlideShare's services. You can upload your slides, documents, Pdfs and even videos. You can use the Zipcast feature and organize web meetings from remote locations. You can even pitch to the clients, share your presentations with them and engage them with through video or audio. The presenter controls the slides but the participants can move them forward and back. You can also hold your webinars using zipcasts. Real time messaging between participants is enabled using HTML5 features. As you can imagine, the number of use cases for this feature can be many depending on your communication need.

Now that is all about students and working professionals. You must be thinking on how does SlideShare be of much use to the Businesses and Marketers. Todd Wheatland, author of  The Marketers Guide to SlideShare, offers three compulsive reasons for the marketers to take notice of the growing power of SlideShare -

• Traffic - SlideShare has over 60 million visitors a month who view over 3 billion slides monthly. SlideShare is one of the top 150 websites in the world and one of the top 50 in India.
• Business Audience - This platform is mainly used by businesses and student community, giving quality audiences for your brand
• Leads - A simple tool called Leadshare helps you set up and manage your campaigns and lets you collect leads. Lead collection forms help you do this by simply being part of your slides.

The public content on SlideShare can be copied and reused by anyone. With the amount of content present with SlideShare, they are easily the biggest muscle in the content marketing business. With more and more businesses diverting their marketing monies to content related marketing, SlideShare's value will soon be evident more clearly.

SlideShare follows a Freemium model for its services. The basic upload of content is a free service which makes your content public. The paid services start from $19 a month and gives access of analytics to you. Also you have the option to make your content private, have an ad-free zipcast,  and upload videos.
Using gold and platinum services allows the custom creation of lead forms, geo targeting and customization of your profile pages.

Your profile pages are equivalent to your channels on Youtube. These channels have a Follow button which allows brands to have a following, a service very similar to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Customizing your pages in sync with your brand profile allows for a seamless synergy between your brand's website and your profile on any other medium. SlideShare's widgets can be directly embedded into your site. This is similar to a Youtube plugin on your site to play videos. You can also promote your site or blog on SlideShare by uploading your content there and thereby bringing the traffic to your site.

Two words define SlideShare in my view - Social and Content. With more and more advertising budgets keep getting directed towards social media and content marketing, SlideShare holds a very unique advantage in this evolving ecosystem and has become very important for businesses and consumers alike. An acquisition by LinkedIn has also done a wealth of good by bringing in the two biggest professionally inclined networks to make use of each other's services. As of Jan'13,  LinkedIn has 200 million active users worldwide. And these users are the prime consumers for SlideShare's services.

Product vision of SlideShare has always been more focused on the width of services than the depth and engagement with the user. Using Agile methodologies to the core, the product has been pivoted multiple times and improved upon. In future, it will be interesting to note the features that they come up with to help meet marketers social objectives, as they vie for a bigger cut of the social media ad budget.

We will continue to track the product and company's progress very closely here at SlickProduct. In the meanwhile, I would strongly advice for you to opt for the $19 silver service and give it a try.