If you have a company presentation, then you can participate in SlideShare. As the name indicates, SlideShare provides tools and web space for publishing your business presentations online.

An astonishing 14 million website visitors, most of them professional people, participate in SlideShare every month, making it 'the world's largest community for sharing presentations'.

How Can SlideShare Help you?
SlideShare can truly claim to be one of the first social networking sites to focus on business, and it is clearly ahead of the pack of other social media websites that adapted their tools to engage the business sector as an afterthought.

Participating as part of the SlideShare community enables you to upload, enhance and share your slides, and discuss other PowerPoint, PDF and Open Office presentations with like-minded people.

The purpose-built online sharing tools allow presentations to be shared privately (for internal use only), as well as publicly, with the aim of eliciting some social interaction from your target audience.

Getting Your Message Heard
Spreading your sales message across multiple web platforms is part of an effective Web 2.0 marketing strategy. With this is mind, you can use SlideShare to help:

• Upload your company presentation to share with new and existing customers
• Publish tutorials about your products to enhance your support services
• Share slides from business presentations as a means of reference and promotion
• Develop conversations with other businesses that relate to your industry
• Add insightful comments to enhance other presentations in your niche

To bring an extra dimension to your presentations, SlideShare tools allow you to synchronise audio with your slides.

Once a presentation is viewed, the 'YouTube-esk' user interface provides all the usual methods of sharing content across the web that millions of web users are now accustomed to.

Making New Connections
As well as publishing your own materials, use the SlideShare search tool to find other presentations that relate to your target market – or simply to locate topics that interest you. Make comments and contribute genuinely to enhance the presenter's message.

As part of the SlideShare community you can join and create groups related to your areas of interest. Monitoring groups will allow you to home in on who will be most compatible with your interests. It will also give you a feel for the tone to take when you first make contact.

Presentation Tips
Adopting a professional but simple approach to preparing your business presentations will enable you to publish short, succinct and memorable marketing messages. With this in mind, here are some tips:

• Be creative with your copy – not with 'wizzy' effects
• Keep the presentation style simple – a light colour background for your slides is ideal
• If you are using images, optimise them so the slides load immediately
• Keep your messages short and to the point
• Consider adding some personality – it is a social networking site, after all
• Don't overwhelm the viewer with facts and figures; use them to enhance your message, not as your message.

If you use business presentations, you may want to consider dusting them off and publishing them on the web. To review the effectiveness of your social media marketing activities, please contact us.