Slideshare is a social media website which allows you to upload your presentations and showcase them to the whole world to see. The audience on SlideShare is so huge that the numbers go beyond 70 million and they are all looking for content that they can relate to and that they need. Slideshare is also one in the top 250 most visited sited in the world. Best of all, you can get this same audience to see your content and help them come back to you for more.

If your business serves other businesses you are in for a good thing with Slideshare as the site gets 5 times more professional users than any other social platforms (Comscore).

You can also re-purpose the content that you have for your business to create slides that people will find useful. In this way, your content doesn’t become stale and your followers will also appreciate the revival of an older content. There is also a chance that your presentation might appear on the main homepage of Slideshare. That should be one of you main objectives when you share on Slideshare because if your presentation does appear on the hompage of Slideshare, you will benefit from the fresh traffic that might come your way.

Kris from Socialmediarevolver.com shared in a post how he managed to get some crazy traffic from Slideshare and Linkedin. He created a 15 page slide masterpiece and uploaded it on Slideshare using can you believe it, a dormant account. Even then, he was able to get his slide featured on the main page of Slideshare which got him quite a impressive number of views.

So, we know now that there is a lot of potential for us to get traffic from Slideshare if we do things right. Lets explore some of the things that we can do in order to get our presentations seen and shared.

1. Create Kickass Quality Presentations on SlideShare

This goes without saying. Everyone wants to look at a slide that has some nice pretty images with text and content that corresponds well with it. Most importantly, your presentation must have a title that catches people’s attention. You can use numbers to show that your presentation is succinct and intend to help save someone save time while at the same time learning some good stuff that they are looking for. A quick look at the homepage of Slideshare shows some presentations that uses numbers in their title.

The above video presentation is titled, “The 7 Qualities of Tomorrow’s Top Leaders” and is found right smacked on the top left hand corner of the Slideshare home page. Imagine how much traffic this video is getting from being placed where it is at the moment of this article’s writing. As it is, the video have already gotten 16,380 views and it was published on 29th February, 2016. Not bad for a few days old video.

A quick scroll down the homepage and we see another featured presentation using numbers in its title, “World in 60 Seconds” by Ian Bremmer.

So, do use numbered titles for your presentation. It gives potential readers to gauge how much time they are going to spend on your presentation and that can make the difference on whether someone would want to click on your presentation or just leave it alone.

2. Produce Content for the Audience that is Already There

The Slideshare audience is made up of professionals and they are the type that go looking for content that can help them improve themselves professionally and business wise. If you can position your content to suit the needs of these people, you will get noticed. So, a presentation that helps people to be more motivated at work for example might just get more views than a presentation on the cutest pandas on earth when it comes to Slideshare (I might be wrong. A search on slideshare on Pandas brought me to this Panda slide with 12,928 views! That goes to show that you can get some good traffic even if you are running a site on Pandas. Lol!)

A presentation on “Motivation at Workplace” got 22,225 views and 16 comments. This goes to show that people are looking for information on Slideshare that helps them to be more productive at work. If you can prepare slides that aim to help people when they are at their workplace, more people will find you.

3. The More Slides the Better or Worst

You might be thinking, “Should I produce slides with less slides or more slides?”

It has been found by HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella that the Slideshare presentations with more than slides tend to do better. They get more views as they get more meaty and more in-depth.

In my opinion, prepare as many slides as you need to and do not just produce more slides for the sake of having more slides.

Yes, the numbers of the data above might compel you to write more for the sake of getting more views, but at times more doesn’t always equal to good. Your presentation might lose its focus and some viewers might even find the lengthiness of your presentation a negative.

So bear in mind that yes, more slides might get more views but also remember to maintain the focus and relevance of what you want to present to your audience.

4. A Technical Presentation or a Persuasive Presentation

Presentations basically fall into 2 main categories: Technical Presentations or Persuasive Presentations

Technical presentations basically aim to teach people about a certain topic and the topic can be anything under the sun or above it.

Persuasive presentations basically aim to make people see something in a certain way, like your brand for example.

However, most presentations that you find on Slideshare combines both elements in it. No matter what, you should try to make your presentation as focused as possible. In this age of digital interruptions it is easy to lose a reader when your presentation is not focused enough.

5. Plan your Slides Well

One sure way to ensure that your presentation is focused and flows well for the reader is to plan your presentation well in advance before commencing to produce it. A simple outline using a free mind mapping tool like bubble.us can help you do the trick. Create a simple outline of the main points in the presentation and don’t forget to add details to the outline once you have the basic outline prepared.

Once you have the main points and the details in place, make sure you sequence the slides in such a way that readers can see the connection between one slide and another slide or between one section of the slide and another section of the slide.

A logical or chronological sequence to your slide will allow your readers an easier time to digest what you have produced.

6. Avoid Stock Powerpoint Templates Like the Plague

Which template below should you choose to create your Slideshare presentation?

Actually both suck.

Both are templates that you can find off the web. Just Google it and you will find some more fuggly slides that practically discourage you from using graphics and instead lead you to what we call the never ending bullet point syndrome which is hard to cure, mind you.

These kind of templates scream boring! You should stay far far away from these type of powerpoint templates when you create your Slideshare presentation. You don’t want your audience to lose focus too fast (due to boredom) and neither would you want to be associated with the something in the early 90s. 🙂

It is best if you can prepare your presentation using a custom theme which uses a colour scheme that matches your logo and a design that is in line with your overall branding.

Choose a maximum of 5 colours and alternate them in your slides. Out of the 5 colours try to choose one accent colour that stands out from the other 4.

The colours that you choose should reflect the tone of your presentation. Use pastel colours and lighter colours if you want to appear mellow and modern and use aggressive and passionate colours like red and orange if you would want to emphasize something really strongly.

Also remember to have a few basic layouts for different parts of the slide. These are the basic 4:

• Transitional Slides
• Image only slides
• Text only slides
• Mixed Slides

Try not to use bullet points in your presentation by varying the size and placement of the text on the slides. Bullets are boring and can make a reader lose interest, especially if you use them too much.

7. Utilise Images Intelligently in your Slides

Images play an important role in presentations, especially when you are uploading them on Slideshare.

Most people are not going to remember the text that you display in your presentation but they will tend to remember your images and the meaningful quotes that you use.

A slide that uses simple graphics above will drive a point closer to home than just text. Sometimes you can also just let the image tell the whole story.

Adding text to the image is also a technique that you can use to emphasize a certain point. You can also use a text colour that contrast with the background. This focuses the reader’s attention to the text. Alternatively, you can also add a semi-transparent background behind the text to add more contrast. Just look at the image below, before and after.

The above image shows the text being presented without a semi-transparent background. You can see that it is hard to read the text if we leave it that way.

By inserting  semi-transparent background behind the text, the text becomes more legible and provides a good contrast between the image background and the message that we are trying to convey.

I can easily write a whole blog post on the right ways to use images in a presentation. Maybe in the future I would but for now here are some tips you can use to ensure that your Slideshare presentations get the eyeballs that you want.

• Use images that have a background colour that is similar with the background of the page.
• Use images that allow you to use them freely and if you need to give credits for the use of the images, do provide the credits.
• Use images that are related to the point that you are making.
• Use images that do not have too much clutter, if not use a semi-transparent background.
• Use images that goes well with the 5 colours you have chosen for use in your slide.

Conclusion 

I hope this article have motivated you to do up a presentation to be shared on Slideshare. You can gain free traffic by having your slides shared on Slideshare. Who knows your slide sharing habits might just get you a client or two and increase your audience count.

Use the tips that I have provided in this article to boost up the likeability factor of your slides too so that there is flow and coherence in your presentation.

– Ardy Ismail