LinkedIn’s making life a little easier for content marketers by making all the features of SlideShare available free of cost.
SlideShare, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, is a popular platform for creating online presentations. Recently it’s become the tool of choice for content marketers presenting infographics, how-to-guides and whitepaper research in an effort to engage potential customers.
In a blog post, SlideShare product manager Amit Sawhney wrote:
Over the last few years, we’ve created and enhanced premium tools built to empower you with better ways to market and share your content. Well, today, we’re answering your call for more features that will broaden your audience. Now, all users will have access to our most popular premium features
Till now, users of SlideShare’s free version weren’t able to access certain premium features, such as analytics, customized profiles and the ability to make presentations private. These features were offered in the PRO version, which cost $19/month and $49/month at different levels of access.
Although LinkedIn says it is simply responding to users requests for more accessibility, the move to make SlideShare free could be part of a wider strategy. With its acquisition of B2B marketing platform Bizo and recent launch of its Sales Navigator tool, LinkedIn continues to mold itself into the ultimate sales and marketing platform for B2B companies. To support that function, LinkedIn can afford to make a useful content marketing tool such as SlideShare free for its platform users, giving marketers and salespeople more of an incentive to use it in conjunction with their lead prospecting and nurturing activity.
SlideShare says it will make one premium feature available for free every month, starting September. Here are details on some of the features we can expect.
Analytics:
Users will now get insights into how many people viewed their presentation, where they’re located and how they found your content. Here’s what the analytics will look like:
Profile customization:
For brands hosting lots of SlideShare presentations, it makes sense to customize their SlideShare profile page to match the company’s personality, much like they would to a LinkedIn Company Page. This includes the ability to customize a banner image and organize the presentations list according to popularity or current trends. Here’s what a personalized SlideShare page looks like:
Private uploads:
Users who don’t want to let the public see their presentation just yet will be able to upload it in private mode, where only select people from their company or friends can see it to offer feedback.
Video uploads:
Along with their SlideShare presentations, users can also upload relevant videos such as conference videos, software demos, interviews and tutorials to create a multimedia experience for visitors coming to their SlideShare page.
