In has just been announced that LinkedIn has now formally purchased Slideshare for just under $120 Million dollars. In what could be termed the most inevitable purchase (based on the fact that the two firms have always had a very close working relationship with Slideshare appearing on the homepage of all LinkedIn accounts), this move will further enhance LinkedIn's already impressive professional networking platform.
Businesses regularly promote their products and services through   power point presentations, so this purchase is a logical step that consolidates LinkedIn ability to offer this capability to all its users.
The acquisition will be formalised in the second quarter of 2012 and is said to involve 45 per cent cash and 55 per cent stock.




Slideshare originally launched in 2006 and has almost 30 million unique visitors, whilst hosting well over seven million power point presentations, which are embedded in more than 1.4 million domains.

Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s Senior Vice President, said that LinkedIn prized Slide Share’s ability to let professionals discover other people through online content and how people were able to lead each other to more content discovery. He said Slideshare will continue to offer that service to its users. But down the road, LinkedIn will look to see how it can use Slideshare to make its users more productive.

 The practicality of this deal makes even more sense when you consider that many businesses are still yet to discover this type of social media network and its potential is so much greater than what it has achieved to date.

What about for your business.  What sorts of information do you think you could put up to enhance your reputation and drive client leads?

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.