Embed Social Sharing Buttons in your SlideShare Presentations

SlideShare is a perfect place for uploading your PowerPoint presentations because it has all the eyeballs but here’s one little known secret – if you can add just one extra slide to your deck, it can possibly help drive even more traffic to your presentations.

HOW TO ADD SOCIAL SHARING BUTTONS IN POWERPOINT

If you want to give this a try, here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how you can easily add social sharing buttons to your PowerPoint Presentations.

1. Add the Twitter and Facebook logo to a new slide of your PowerPoint presentation.

2. Under Drawing, choose the Rectangle tool and draw it around one of the social buttons such that the rectangular shape completely covers the button.

3. While the shape is selected, set the Shape Fill and the Shape Outline options to None.

4. The rectangle is almost invisible now. Press Ctrl + K to turn that shape into a hyperlink. You may use the following values for the hyperlink field:

http://twitter.com/share?url=http://example.com&text=My+Presentation
http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://example.com

Replace example.com with your own URL, save and upload it to SlideShare. 

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Upload your Photos to YouTube and Publish as a Video Slideshow

How do you share a picture slideshow on YouTube?

Previously, you would use a tool like Windows Movie Maker or Picasa to stitch the image files into a video for uploading to YouTube. That addition step is however not required as you can create a video slideshow from pictures directly inside YouTube. Here’s how:

CREATE A PHOTO SLIDESHOW IN YOUTUBE

While you are on the YouTube website, click the Upload button and then choose “Create” under “Photo Slideshow.” Here, switch to the Upload Photos section and drag-drop all the pictures that you would like to be included in your slideshow.

Once the photos are in timeline editor (see screenshot), you can drag them around to rearrange their position in the video. On the next screen, you have an option to change the default duration of individual slides and also the transition effect between pictures.

You can add background music to your slideshow though YouTube does not offer an option to upload your own audio files for the slideshow.

You can set the privacy to Unlisted if you would not like the video to appear in YouTube search. Also, YouTube might include ads in your video if you have attached a background track to your slideshow and the revenue in that case is shared with the music creator.

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Save SlideShare Presentations as Animated GIFs

A web called GIFDeck helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop.

Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion.

While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message – just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window – and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client.

Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any browser or email client. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support animated GIFs yet.

Internally, the GIF Deck app uses the GIF.js library to convert the individual deck images into a GIF image. The library supports all modern web browsers and it does the conversion in the client’s browser.

The only downside is that the generated GIF images aren’t optimized so if you are trying to convert an image-heavy presentation into a GIF, the image file could easily run into a few megabytes. The app’s source code can be found on Github.

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