Using PDF Software with Slideshare

A recent article on cmo shared some pretty interesting statistics about the slide deck hosting service Slideshare. What stands out as most impressive is the fact that in the fourth quarter of 2013, Slideshare averaged 60 million unique visitors a month and 215 million page views. Among business owners the site averages 500 times more traffic than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

When it comes to Slideshare content, most people simply upload the slide deck from a presentation they gave. Since most presentation experts advise against too much text in a PowerPoint presentation, this can make things difficult for anyone reviewing this content on Slideshare who wasn’t at the original presentation to hear what the presenter was saying. All they see are some great graphics and maybe a few words of supporting text or statistics.

Using your PDF software to supplement that slide deck, however, can help make the content you share on Slideshare more helpful, and meaningful, to anyone who views it.

If you’re looking to do more with a slide deck you’ve created in presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, PDF software gives you benefits such as page customization, built in object editing and text formatting tools and support for embedding video and audio files, just to name a few of those in this blog post.

We can’t overstate the importance of providing good visual support for the strategy of your presentation, especially when you’re not there to present it yourself. In fact, a study from the International Journal of Business Communications concluded that “subjects who were exposed to a graphic representation of the strategy paid significantly more attention to, agreed more with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list version.”

Using PDF software you have the tools to overlay content to support that image for anyone consuming the content online. You can also augment your presentation by embedding audio into your document to provide your explanation along with the graphic. All of this serves to provide much-needed context.

But my slide decks are all in PowerPoint

Even if most of your organization’s presentations are already in PowerPoint and you don’t want to recreate them in another software application like their PDF software, it’s not a problem if you use Foxit PhantomPDF. With a few clicks, you have the ability to convert your PowerPoint files into a PDF document. From here, you can overlay supporting content or even embed those audio files so others get the full effect of your presentation.

A PDF Editor like Foxit PhantomPDF provides all of the features necessary to create rich documents not only to use as slide decks in live presentations, but also to upload to services like Slideshare, complete with the context new audiences need when viewing your presentations long after you’ve given them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *