Slideshare's Hyperlink Clampdown: A Demo and Workaround Tips

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Slideshare is a fantastic tool for individuals and businesses to share ideas and reach an audience of many millions of people. And while the site enourages the publishing of insightful and helpful content, it looks now to be clamping down on those whose presentations don't quite share its priorities. As such, any links that appear on the first three slides of a Slideshare presentation will not be clickable. 

As you can see in the hastily-created four-slide demonstration above, the hyperlinks I have placed on the first three slides are not clickable, but the one on the final slide is.

In my book, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips , I recommend that Slideshare users include links in the opening slides of their presentations... not necessarily big, bold, and in your face, but at least given a presence in case a viewer takes notice but does not necessarily reach the end of the presentation. Better to have it appear even subtly than not at all! Placing it at the bottom of every slide, unobtrusively, is another alternatively. 

Now that this change has rolled out, I would not change my advice, but do suggest that if you are going to feature hyperlinks at the very beginning of your Slideshare presentations, that the URLs are short and memorable. If your links is long and complicated and  not clickable, the chances of someone taking the time to type it manually into their browser's address bar is slim to none.

Andrew Macarthy is the author of the #1 Amazon Web Marketing Bestseller, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips, available for Kindle and in paperback.

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