SlideShare Pro eases the pain of sharing presentations


SlideShare Pro is a platform that allows clients to upload and share presentations, documents, videos, and webinars, both publicly and privately. Users have the ability to tag, review, rate, comment on, download, and embed content. Analytics and tracking features include the ability to view company, location, referrers, search keywords, performance measurements for Facebook and Twitter, and alerts when links are opened.
Plans start at $19 per month. Nonprofit and educational pricing is available.
Acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn.

Rachel DiCaro Metscher, director of advocacy and communications at Hobsons, has been using SlideShare Pro since February 2012.
How do you use it?
It's very easy to use. You log on to the website and click on an upload link. You type in tags, which will enable audiences to find your presentation, but there's a limit of 20 tags per presentation. You can also assign it to a pre-determined category. For example, if I have a presentation on social media I'd assign it to the social media category. That's it. You click to upload and you're done.
With SlideShare Pro, you can set up a corporate channel for your presentations. People can subscribe and are notified of new presentations as they are uploaded.
I haven't noticed any changes since LinkedIn acquired SlideShare in May 2012.
If you're having any problems with SlideShare, there's a support button on LinkedIn. There's also a forum for common problems. If you're experiencing something technical, you can log on and submit a ticket from inside your account or post it to the forum.
How does it serve your business needs?
SlideShare Pro is a way for Hobsons to share our commercial insights on multiple platforms, and it's visual, which is highly engaging.
It's a hidden gem for anyone looking to create content. For any PR pro trying to help their clients or their company establish expertise, this should be their go-to platform. It complements any marketing strategy.
We attend more than 40 conferences per year and we wanted a way to get audiences' attention after conferences. I can post my presentation while I'm at a conference, or before I go to one. Before, I had to go through all the business cards I collected when I got home and email the presentation to everyone. It opens my content up to a larger audience than the 50 or 100 people who attended my presentation.
It's really easy to share. At a recent conference, an audience member blogged about my presentation and linked to my SlideShare post.
Another one of my needs is to increase engagement and awareness of Hobsons on social media channels. I can post a presentation, including my notes if I want to, and immediately share it on any social channel.
It gives me a way to repurpose content that doesn't take a lot of effort. Our executives are busy and I often struggle to get them to contribute content for our blog. When they have to present, I can just reuse their presentation content on our blog.
We currently only use SlideShare Pro for conference presentations. LinkedIn has expanded it so you can add audio, infographics, document downloads, and there's also some capability around a conference line. In the future we may expand use to include infographics and document downloads.
It's Web-based. There's also a mobile app.
What are the main benefits?
It makes it easy to share presentation content and connect with audiences beyond those who attended a presentation in person.  
Lead generation. There's a lead generation option you can select when you're setting up the presentation. If you select it, a pop-up window asks the viewer to submit contact details if they're interested in more information. It's not intrusive, and they can easily exit out if they're not interested.
Analytics. There's a whole analytics dashboard that lets SlideShare Pro members review the number of views, referrals, and downloads a presentation gets. It's really great and helps me know what kind of content resonates and what doesn't.
It's affordable. We're a Gold Pro member and our subscription is $490 annually.
What are the main drawbacks?
There's only one drawback and it's related to the user, not the product. If you don't have a steady pipeline of presentations, not many people will subscribe to your channel.
What would you like to see improved / added?
I'd like to see some improvement with analytics. For example, I'd love to know unique views versus total views.
I would like to see SlideShare provide analytics and insights similar to LinkedIn's. LinkedIn is a data machine and adding similar capabilities to SlideShare would make SlideShare that much more powerful. 

: document sharing website.
SlideBoom: online slide hosting service.

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