Slideshare Pro for B2B content marketing

For some B2B marketers, Slideshare is where old presentations go to die.

For us, it’s a powerful content marketing medium in itself:

It’s a great way to tell a linear story – letting the user just click, click, click from start to end.

It’s easy to embed – in our blog (like this one: 3 Poisonous Metaphors). And — even cooler – in other people’s blogs: ‘Three Poisonous Metaphors’ has been embedded on 19 other sites so far.

You get a bonus audience – from the Slideshare user base: 2463 of our 6460 views to date of ‘Three Poisonous Metaphors’ came from the Slideshare site itself. That’s a big bonus. Much as we love Prezi, you don’t get that level of extra views from their far smaller user base.

Going PRO

Weirdly, we only just upgraded to a Slideshare PRO account. There’s something about a paywall that repels people beyond all reason. (I once attended an opening at the Tate Modern that was uncomfortably packed. I paid three quid to get into a side exhibition and it was virtually empty. Three quid!). At $19 a month (a bit less if you pay annually), I can already see it’s going to be worth it.

What PRO lets you do.

You can get the full Plan Comparison table here but the reasons we decided to upgrade were:

Better analytics. I’ll show you in a sec.

No more ads – I always hated the ads for other content that come along with the embed code

Lead generation – you can include a simple form to capture leads; not sure how that will go for us but worth a try (PRO caps out at 30 a month so don’t get too excited).

Better display settings – so our page looks a bit more professional. Not as good as fully custom pages (that’s GOLD) but better than standard

There’s other stuff (private uploads, bigger files, video uploads, “meetings” – huh?) but those are the main ones for us.

The Analytics

I took a few screenshots for those of you too cheap to spring for your own Slideshare PRO account (I mean, geez).

First, is the Analytics Summary dashboard:

You can drill down for a dashboard for any specific presentation and look at downloads and tweets (nice).

You can also drill down to see who has viewed each presentation – by user name, location, inferred company and geography). I’d show you that screen but it would violate someone’s privacy and then I’d have to seek asylum and hole up in the Ecuadorean embassy for years and, frankly, I just don’t think it’s worth it).

This next chart is cool, too, with pretty colours and squiggles and all. I’m not sure what it tells me but I feel smarter just looking at it:

Finally this is the panel for setting up your lead capture form:

The Advanced options give you a bit more granularity and control — like sticking the form after page 10 and forcing people to fill it out to continue reading — which strikes me as more than a little crass, but hey – B2B content marketing is a broad church.

There are more thing to show but that ought to give you enough reason to pluck up your courage, approach the person with the purse strings and ask for $19 a month.

We’ll report back about how we get on with Slideshare PRO but that’s a first impression.

Anyone out there have any other Slideshare experiences or tips to share? Anybody doing GOLD or, dare I say it, PLATINUM?

UPDATE: Since publishing, this, we had our biggest Slideshare success to date: Crap: why the greatest threat to content marketing is content marketing.

It earned 116,000 views in its first ten days. Yikes.