We recently described how we use social media at Forum One. Today we'll talk about the category leader for posting and sharing PowerPoint presentations, SlideShare.

Since we're a consulting firm, we (and many of our clients) produce a lot of PowerPoints. Some of them are not too bad. We've used SlideShare actively for the last three years posting our better efforts, as well as presentations from many of the events we host. The Forum One channel on SlideShare currently has 64 presentations.

The good news about SlideShare is that it is free, relatively easy to use (we'd give it a B+ for usability - some uploading is tricky), and seems to attract a lot of traffic. Our presentations have had about 90,000 views, with 5000 new views per month. This is more than they receive when posted on our own site. (A "view" means someone went at least to the landing page of the presentation, but didn't necessarily open it.) We assume that this attention is useful for propagating our firm's name and ideas.

The bad news is that we don't see SlideShare as a significant source of referral traffic to our web site. We're careful about including contact information in all of our presentations and on the presentation description pages, but despite our efforts we don't see much impact. About 30% of the traffic to our site is "direct" (that is, somebody already knows us and types in our URL), so it is possible that some of that is due to SlideShare.

Our overall conclusion is that for relatively little effort we can post presentations, refer to them in our daily correspondence which is useful, and (probably) benefit from their broader exposure on SlideShare.

Feel free to post your experience in comments below!

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