Launched two years ago, Amazon’s influencer program still isn’t quite going anywhere, say brands, agencies and influencers. Most people don’t know about the program. It invites celebrities, micro-influencers and, in some cases, regular people with moderate followings to sign up for their own…
influencers
The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare
In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
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Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
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HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
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So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations. But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
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Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
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The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
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During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
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Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding.
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Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future.
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Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
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Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
- First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare.
- Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
- Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
Top Content Creators use the title “How a Brand Does Something”
Top Content Creators often use articles with a title similar to the following template:
How (Brand) Is Doing (Something) to Achieve (Result) to Draw a Bigger Audience
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Brand name recognition
Nielsen wanted to determine why people purchased specific products. What did it find? Brand! -
Influencer involvement
These articles are, by definition, exploring how awesome these companies are. They’re literally saying, “If (brand) does it, it must be worth trying.” The brand gets external links, a huge trust boost, and an increased brand awareness it probably doesn’t need (but never hurts).
5 steps to use this article model
To create your own content using this article model, follow these five steps.
1. Identify an innovative company or thought leader
The most challenging part is determining what business to target. Once you get that down, the rest of the article follows a path set by them, not you.
Here are a few guidelines:
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Identify a business that doesn’t feel too out of reach. Avoid megabrands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Salesforce, as it’ll be tough for your reader to relate to the strategies they’re implementing.
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Identify a business implementing innovative or interesting strategies. It should be doing something worth writing about. Your article will be harder to write (and less interesting) if you pick a big brand name that isn’t doing something exciting.
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Target a business doing something interesting related to your business. There’s no point in getting people excited about a strategy that doesn’t relate to your business.
2. Start your research
Explore the company’s sales funnel. Start with the first possible touch-point. Try a search or display advertisement, a blog article, a press release, etc.
As you proceed through the funnel – from ad or article to lead generation to email marketing to sales prompt, take screenshots. Your article will be framed by that funnel.
3. Reach out to a representative
You want the company on your side before you publish your insight and observations about what it does. And, if possible, you want information from the company. Try something like this:
Hey [first name of contact],
Hope this finds you well. I am (your name) and was talking to your colleague, (name), and she mentioned you were the one behind (specific strategy you’re writing about). I’d like to congratulate you on putting together one of the most innovative marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.
Your (specific strategy) would be an awesome topic for an article I would like to write. I would appreciate it if you would have the time for an interview to walk through what you’ve done and inspire other marketers to do something similar. Would you have 15 minutes this week to jump on a call so I can ask you a few questions about the thinking behind the strategy and if it’s performing for you guys?
I look forward to hearing from you!
If they don’t have time for a call, send over a few questions and ask if they have time to respond that way. And if they don’t have time for that, write the article without their involvement, but share the link once it’s done. You’ll still get the bump from a recognizable brand name in your title and the brand will have been made aware your article is being published.
4. Go a step above with design
Your article ideally will be at least 2,000 words and broken into several sections. As a result, a table of contents will help readers navigate.
You can format an automated table of contents within your article..
5. Promote to specific influencers
If you need help creating an influencer list, use a tool like BuzzSumo.
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Research the influencers before you reach out to them to better
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Learn if they are interested in content similar to what you’re doing.
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Follow them on social media.
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Then reach out to the influencer and Personalize the outreach.
This is a form of name-jacking!
Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
Three steps to great Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing delivers results with a great ROI, yet many small businesses don’t know how to proceed.
The two main areas of your marketing strategy that work in sync with influencer marketing are content and social media. Content A lot of influencer marketing campaigns will involve creating content in partnership with an influencer. This may mean creating something together or one of you creating content for the other’s platform. Social Media Most campaigns also have a heavy social media component. Influencer campaigns often involve them sharing certain content or participating in a campaign, such as using its branded hashtag.
1: Identify the Right Influencer
Most marketers find the biggest challenge is to identify the right influencer(s) for their brand.
Favorite tool BuzzSumo provides a list of influencer(s) with stats to showcase the content and level of influence.
KPIs | Use the right metrics to find the best influencers
- Relevance – Does the influencer have a voice with your audience?
- Content – Can the influencer create authentic and engaging content to promote your brand? Can you provide content?
- Engagement – Can the influencer effectively engage their audience?
2: Measuring ROI
Keep track of the content each influencer creates for your brand. Analyze reach, views, clicks, engagement, and conversions. Define performance metrics that measure the ROI of your campaigns and understand which results influencers drive.
3: Engaging Influencers
it’s challenging to communicate with all the influencers you want to reach out to. Research the best influencers and find out what their values are, then how they interact with their followers.
Connect and engage influencers with the right content
Monitor influencer activity and understand influencer interests. The right influencer marketing tools can help.
Sources: Business2community and Econsultancy
Master influencer marketing and grow your brand
Influencer Marketing in 2017 results from a survey of top marketers across industries how 86% of marketers use the channel, with content being the top driver, illustrating that influencer marketing and content marketing are often done together.
Top reasons marketers use influencer marketing:
- 89% to create brand content
- 77% to drive engagement
- 56% to drive traffic to websites or landing pages.
The best influencer content tends to be organic.
While you want to give influencers some brand guidelines and talk about business goals, you’ll get the best results when you select the right influencers and trust them to engage in whatever way they feel resonates with your audience.
You chose them for influence; give them the freedom to use it.
Invite your influencers to use their voices to amplify what they’re seeing and trust that what they say will elevate your brand’s thought leadership.
Influencers don’t want to merely repeat brand messages, they want to share their insights and voice, often on partner networks.
Influencer marketing’s real value with the greatest impact comes from influencers building relationships with potential customers and repeat interactions with the audience.
Reference ibm.com
Michael Stuart
1stonlinetech