Why LinkedIn paid $119 million for presentation sharing site Slideshare

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn; the social networking site for professionals, recently announced that his company will shell out $119 million for the presentation sharing site SlideShare. That’s lot money, you would say, for a site that lets people share PowerPoint presentations. So what was the value that LinkedIn saw in this deal? The deal is a strategic value addition to LinkedIn, being a social networking platform; its users will now have direct access to tools that will let them share their presentations directly on their profiles.

LinkedIn has approximately 161 million users globally. It’s the largest social networking site for professionals out there. SlideShare helps people share their ideas via presentations. Presentations are an important tool for professionals to share their business ideas, reports etc. Hence SlideShare fits perfectly into LinkedIn’s objective of providing professionals to share ideas and help them network. 9 million presentations have been added to SlideShare so far and the site had received 29 million unique visitors in the month of March. Considering these figures it’s easy to see how SlideShare is a strategic fit for LinkedIn.

You can think of SlideShare like a Pinterest for professionals. Pinterest lets people share their ideas through images. Similarly professionals share their ideas through presentations. Presentations are richer in content than simple text files. Adding presentation sharing service to LinkedIn will make the site more engaging for its users. The one thing that LinkedIn wants the most is to make its users spend much more time on the site. And this is where SlideShare will help LinkedIn generate that stickiness among its users.

LinkedIn likes to talk a lot about the number of members it has, and more so about the make-up of this membership. All of the Fortune 500 companies are present on its site, it claims. But when it comes to mind share of C-level executives SlideShare is ahead of LinkedIn.  SlideShare gets 40% more traffic from C-level executives than LinkedIn. With the purchase of SlideShare LinkedIn has bought over those hard earned C-level executives mindshare.

Lastly, SlideShare deal also fits perfectly with its recent purchase of Rapportive, a Gmail plug-in that ties up ones email id to their social accounts. So if someone sends a mail to me, I can see all of his social account names – Facebook, Twitter etc. right on the email. Rapportive buy will help LinkedIn spread its reach to all forms of content sharing be it emails or social networking sites and SlideShare. Considering all the above points I feel SlideShare seems like a natural fit for LinkedIn. Now we need to wait and watch how the guys at LinkedIn integrate SlideShare into the Linked platform.