SlideShare Deepens Ties With LinkedIn

SlideShare, a site for posting, viewing, rating and commenting on business presentations, documents and videos, is deepening its integration with LinkedIn, the professional networking site.

There is a lot of overlap between the user bases of the two sites, so it makes sense for SlideShare to expand its links with the larger LinkedIn.

While professionals come to SlideShare to seek and share business information, LinkedIn has become the preferred site for people to engage in career networking.

SlideShare, which has had a LinkedIn application since 2008, will announce on Wednesday that it’s added a LinkedIn Share button to all of its presentations, documents and videos.

That way, users will be able to share SlideShare content with their LinkedIn contacts from within the SlideShare interface, via their LinkedIn activity stream.

In addition, when LinkedIn users see a SlideShare link or thumbnail in their activity streams, they’ll be able to click on it and view the content on LinkedIn without having to move to SlideShare.

“We’re making it easier to share SlideShare content on LinkedIn, as well as making it easier to engage with SlideShare content on LinkedIn,” said Ross Mayfield, SlideShare’s vice president of business development.

In addition, SlideShare will become a source of content for LinkedIn Today, the publication-like digest of news articles that LinkedIn customizes for its users based on their interests and the content being shared by their contacts.

SlideShare thus becomes the first content provider for LinkedIn Today that isn’t a publisher, but rather a community-driven site, according to Mayfield.

SlideShare has about 55 million unique monthly visitors to its site, most of them professionals, and they view about 3 billion slides every month, he said. LinkedIn has about 100 million site members worldwide, according to the company.