Secret recipe for getting your content to go viral on SlideShare.

1. February 2014
SOCIAL
STRAND
MEDIA
SECRET RECIPE FOR GETTING YOUR CONTENT TO
GO VIRAL ON SLIDESHARE
Social Strand Media Case Study | by @tracysestili

2. [SECRET RECIPE FOR GETTING YOUR CONTENT TO GO VIRAL ON
February 1, 2014 SLIDESHARE]
Secret Recipe for Getting Your Content to Go Viral [whitepaper]
Recently we had a SlideShare presentation that got over 10,000 views in its first
24-hours of being published. It’s now at 20,000+ views after a week. But not all
of our SlideShare presentations get that much traction so quickly. In fact, we’ve
published 36 presentations to date and only a handful of them received a few
thousand views. The rest are in the hundreds. Clearly, it seems we finally got
something right. But what made this presentation different from the others? As
we reviewed this deck with others we’ve created, we noticed a few things that
made this presentation stand out among the rest.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
For starters, we had good cover art and a good theme layout. As you advanced past the first page, we
were consistent in our theme, giving it a professional polished look and feel.
Our deck was helpful.
We didn’t put any spammy self-promotional content in there other than the name of our website and a
helpful hashtag, in case people wanted to tweet it. This made us likeable. We also clearly added the
source on each page, adding to the authenticity.
Brevity is best.
Although we don’t have any hard stats on length of slide decks that work best, our slide deck was short:
only 10 slides to be exact.
Additional key elements: CTR
However, some key elements that perhaps were the most important contributors in making it go viral
were that it had a catchy title, it was relevant to our key audience, and it was timely.
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Catchy: The title was 2014 Social Media Stats You Need To Know (and can tweet). It was catchy
and delivered exactly what it said – no gimmicks.
Timely: It was timely because we released it (limited) on January 2, 2014. We tend to share new
creative content on our LinkedIn Company page first to reward our loyal fans.
Relevant: It was relevant because at the start of a new year, everyone is looking for social media
stats to benchmark themselves against for the upcoming year.
Promoting it
We made a conscious decision to give it limited exclusive exposure in the first 24-hours to our corporate
LinkedIn audience. Afterward, we followed up with organic posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
Pro Tip: Amplify your slide deck on all of your social channels to get maximum exposure.

3. [SECRET RECIPE FOR GETTING YOUR CONTENT TO GO VIRAL ON
February 1, 2014 SLIDESHARE]
Sharing it on our LinkedIn Company page garnered a 7.14% organic engagement rate.
We then embedded it on our blog the next day for the rest of our constituents. We tweeted it a few
times, but it seemed that we didn’t need to do much promoting on social media to get it out in front of
the people who would find it most valuable – marketers. We also followed up and thanked people for
sharing it on social via SlideShare’s analytics.
24% of our traffic came from LinkedIn and 6% came from embedded views on other sites. Over 60% came
from SlideShare.
We also gained 14 qualified leads.
Our takeaway to get a SlideShare deck to go viral:
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Have good cover art
Have a catchy headline
Give credit and annotate sources where applicable
Keep in short and simple
Make it relevant and useful to the intended audience
To get first dibs or exclusive access to our content, follow us on LinkedIn or SlideShare
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