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It’s one of my favorite social media platforms for conveying thought-leadership and sharing value with a target audience. Yet when I mention it to some of my personal branding clients, they have never heard of it. That’s surprising, considering there are tens of millions of uploads to it, in 40 different categories. And according to expanded ramblings, it has 70 million users. The platform I am talking about is SlideShare.
SlideShare was founded in 2006 – just two years after LinkedIn – to facilitate the sharing of thought-leadership. As part of LinkedIn’s strategy to become an even more powerful tool for personal branding, they bought SlideShare in 2012. Since then, 19.7 million SlideShares have been posted to LinkedIn .
It’s visual.
It’s a great place to share your expertise and tell your story in a visual way – allowing you to convey more information and reinforce your point of view. If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can convey an entire novel of content in just a dozen slides.
It’s ideal for expressing thought-leadership.
Across corporate America, presentations are used to share thought-leadership thousands of times a day. They combine words and images with a unique process flow that makes them perfect for conveying insights and expertise.
It gets you noticed.
Attract the attention of people who need to know you. According to Expanded Ramblings, 80% of SlideShare’s traffic comes from search. SlideShare also allows your presentations, infographics, documents and videos to be shared via other social media.
It helps you stand out.
Not everyone is using SlideShare – yet! It can be your tool to stand out and showcase your insights in ways that will captivate your audience and attract them to you. When you write a blog, you only have words to demonstrate your expertise. With slides, you can combine images, color, and words to express your message with greater depth and clarity.
It’s easy.
We have become quite sophisticated at creating presentations – because it’s something most of us do regularly to communicate our message in the work environment. You likely have beautiful content you created that could be effectively delivered through SlideShare. Converting content like a Blog or article into a presentation has two benefits: First, it allows you to practice the important personal branding technique we call being lazy. Being lazy means re-using and repurposing content. This makes it available to a more diverse (yet targeted) audience and reduces the effort required to create it. As an added bonus, it helps you reinforce your message and point-of-view – bolstering your personal brand.
So how do you create a SlideShare that will stand out and get you noticed? Here’s the simple three-step process:
- Know
You need to know what you want to say, who your audience should be, and what value you will deliver. Remember, it’s not about selling your skills or products. It’s about sharing insights that will help others be more successful. You need to focus on your audience – deciding what you want them to know, how you want them to feel and what you want them to do after having viewed your SlideShare. Focus on your target audience and you’re off to a great start.
- Show
It’s not just about the story you are telling, but how you tell that story. You want to tell it in a visually compelling way. And you want to make it memorable. That means using your personal brand identity system (PBID) consistently. Your PBID is made up of fonts, colors and images. Together, they form the packaging of your brand. Used consistently, they help convey your brand attributes and become memorable. Today, everyone needs their own PBID. The most important element is color – because color exudes emotion, which in turn enhances memorability. Use color consistently to captivate your audience. But use it appropriately – you don’t want your slides to look like a bucket of confetti. To learn what color to use for your personal brand, check out this video.
- Grow
Let’s be clear. You need to reinforce relationships with your existing brand community members, but you also need to attract more people in your target audience so you can grow your brand to include all those who will be important to your career success. That means optimizing your slides for search engines. As I said earlier, 80% of the views come from search, so you want to make your content as search-friendly as possible. In short, use the keywords you want to be known for multiple times throughout your slides, in the filename as well as in the description of the presentation and the tags. And remember to add a slide that makes it easy for people to reach out to you to keep the conversation going.
I took the “be lazy” approach and turned this post into a SlideShare. Want to see it? You'll find it here.
Remember to make your profile relevant, authentic and accurate so you can build emotional connections with those who engage with your SlideShares. Here’s the first step: watch my recorded webinar on creating a compelling LinkedIn summary here.
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