slideshare for marketing & pubic relations

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SlideShare, once touted as an outstanding PR and marketing tool, is sliding into oblivion. In fact, former fans lament that the hosting service is already dead.

Invented in India in 2009 to be a YouTube for presentations, SlideShare quickly became massively popular by providing a social channel for presentations. By 2016, it had more than 70 million unique visitors a day.

But its popularity recently plunged. Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months, writes Mathew Sweezey, principal of marketing insights at Salesforce.com, in MarketingProfs. HubSpot posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, but posted only once in 2018, reaching a just over 1,000 users.

Did LinkedIn Kill SlideShare?

Observers blame LinkedIn, which purchased SlideShare, for its demise.

LinkedIn was distracted by the acquisition of Lynda in 2015, the introduction of its Pulse publishing platform, and its 2016 acquisition by Microsoft. In addition, targeting ads to US-based businesses, LinkedIn’s core demographic, was difficult on SlideShare. Only 8.7% of SlideShare’s total traffic is from the US.

SlideShare staff manually selected the best presentations to feature. That manual curation attracted loyal fans and fueled its growth. Then LinkedIn purchased SlideShare in 2012 and dropped manual curation in 2016, Sweezey says.

SlideShare also removed its re-upload feature in 2017. Users can no longer update their previous presentations.

“Imagine you post a presentation, and notice you have a typo (broken URL, misspelling, etc.) and want to fix it,” Sweezey says. “The re-upload feature was the only way to do that while maintaining the backlinks necessary for modern marketing. It was a simple yet necessary feature for content marketers and others.”

SlideShare’s inactive Twitter account and LinkedIn Page offer a definite sign that LinkedIn has given up on the hosting service.

Marketing expert Jay Baer agrees with Sweezey’s assessment. Baer praised SlideShare in 2015. He called it content marketing’s secret weapon, noting that only 15 percent of social media marketers used the service. Baer has now reversed his opinion and says LinkedIn has ruined SlideShare. Under LinkedIn’s ownership, SlideShare eliminated features and eliminated staff, leaving little more than a handful of engineers. Despite a deluge of internet content, SlideShare posts plunged.

Possible Alternatives

Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365 and bring a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future. New startups, such as SlideCraft and EDOCR, may re-create the social aspect of slides. However, those predictions are speculative, Sweezey says. Prezi, offers an alternative to SlideShare, but it requires users create content in Prezi’s own software rather than PowerPoint.

New website plugins, such as Speakerstack, allow organizations to host their slides on their own websites. Users can share and embed content and JavaScript for tracking and lead-generation purposes.

The demise of SlideShare illustrates the risks of building PR and marketing campaigns on rented land. Social media platforms attract many companies and not-for-profit organizations willing to build their future on rented digital property in order to avoid technical issues and reduce costs. However, relying on third-party networks, especially a single platform, poses enormous risks for public relations and marketing.

With that lesson in mind, business professionals may prefer hosting their presentations on their own websites.

Bottom Line: SlideShare once enjoyed a loyal fan base and offered a superb PR and marketing tool, especially for B2B marketers. But the hosting service for slide presentations was lost in the shuffle of shifting corporate priorities and has become a victim of corporate neglect. Marketers seeking other ways to share their presentations should look first to their own websites.