If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will no doubt understand the power of social media and are probably an avid user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. If you're a business owner or brand manager, you'll see the benefit of using social media to be where your customers are and engage with them in the chat. However, there is another type of social network that is so easily overlooked, and that is the document sharing network. You may have already heard of some of them (SlideShare, Sribd, Docstoc & Speaker Deck?) or maybe not! Document sharing and hosting might not sound sexy, but it's incredibly powerful and a great way to generate leads and market your content. SlideShare Infographic: The Silent Giant of Content Marketing.
Take a look at this infographic produced by SlideShare (by clicking on the image you will see the document hosted on SlideShare itself). Obviously, since it's produced by SlideShare itself, it's important to think of it as a form of advertising, but the employee data stats are very compelling, especially when it comes to business traffic. SlideShare, according to research by ComScore, receives 5 times more traffic from business owners than Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or even LinkedIn. You will also see in the infographic that the primary traffic for content marketing material sharing sites is for business to business (B2B).
If your company has a solution to a problem that another company is having, uploading a document explaining how to fix that problem to a document-sharing site could lead to much more exposure for your company than traditional social networking sites. like Twitter and Facebook never would. hope to achieve. Document sharing sites have the advantage of making your documents and content more easily found by search engines, social networks, and perhaps even more powerfully other users of document sharing sites.