Spreading the word: The ripple effect of Slideshare

Last week I led a Twitter Mini Masterclass at Sheffield Hallam University with my colleague Joe Field and posted my presentation slides on to Slideshare. I was thrilled to receive an email from Slideshare to say it had been selected to be featured on their home page.

   

Slideshare Tweets

Slideshare also tweeted a link to my presentation via @SlideShareToday and @SlideShare. At this point in time my slideshare had 196 views. 

'Twitter Mini Masterclass' by @suebecks is featured on our homepage. slidesha.re/101jRwE
— SlideShare Today (@SlideShareToday) May 15, 2013

Best practices for using Twitter hashtags, search, lists, analytics and dashboards: slidesha.re/10zGZRL via @suebecks
— SlideShare (@SlideShare) May 16, 2013

IMPACT

In the space of five days my slideshare has had over 3.5k views and 29 downloads, 14 shares on Facebook, 36 via Twitter and 15 via LinkedIn. 

You can track this data on Slideshare each time you upload a presentation. (More in depth analytics are available via the Pro version). There is also space for viewers to leave comments; a very useful opportunity to receive feedback on your presentations. 

Once you have uploaded your presentation slides you can choose to share your work through your own social channels and grab the embed code to display the slide deck within your blog or website.

Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth uses SlideShare to share his keynote presentations that he gives all over the world.  One of his most popular slideshares to date was an invited speech given at the Learning Technologies event in 2012, which has currently had over 54k views. (I would recommend following Steve on Twitter as @timbuckteeth). 


I've often thought it is a shame that conference presentations are not shared beyond the event and conference website. Using SlideShare enables access to a far wider audience and good use of tags will help viewers to find your presentations via the search facility within Slideshare. Accompanying or subsequent papers and documents can also be added as PDFs. 

I give all of my work a Creative Commons licence which means viewers can download and share with accreditation but cannot use commercially. 

I think it is suffice to say that sharing your work in this way is undoubtedly an additional and very effective way of disseminating your work. Whilst I can't expect every presentation to be featured the possibility that it might is a bonus!