In a $118 million deal, LinkedIn this month acquired SlideShare, a social media website in which users upload presentations and other materials. The site is home to roughly nine million presentations.

What does this deal mean for PR professionals?

Since 2008, SlideShare has had an app on LinkedIn that lets you share your slides with your LinkedIn network. How SlideShare will be integrated with LinkedIn in the long run remains to be seen, but there are plenty of reasons to incorporate SlideShare into your existing communications strategies—if you haven’t already.

Here are several reasons why:

Show your work to hundreds of millions people.

Often, after a speaking event is over, your beautifully crafted presentation finds a permanent home on … your computer drive. With SlideShare, that presentation can find a new home—in a place where millions of people can see it.

(You can also upload documents, videos, or infographics to SlideShare.)

SlideShare grabs about 29 million monthly unique visitors. LinkedIn has 161 million members and 107 million monthly unique visitors. Combining the traffic of both sites represents a sharp increase in the number of eyeballs on your presentation.

Even better, SlideShare is available on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ as apps. The site recommends linking all three accounts together, in what it calls a “holy triad in place,” because it will further boost the reach of your content. By doing so, you can sync your accounts, which means when you upload a presentation on one site, it automatically goes on the other two.

Drive significant traffic to your site.

Getting your presentation featured on SlideShare’s front page—such as its “Hot on Facebook” or “Hot on Twitter” sections—can help generate significant views and traffic. Web designer Kris Olin offers a helpful case study on how his “Facebook Advertising Guide” generated crazy traffic when the presentation was featured on SlideShare’s “Hot on LinkedIn” section. Later, SlideShare’s editorial team picked the guide for the featured section on the homepage.

Elevate your profile to become an expert—or find that dream job.

Sharing your presentations can help elevate your profile as an expert and make you more attractive to recruiters and potential employers.

With the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, you can showcase your presentations alongside your professional accomplishments and résumé. It can be a great way to reinforce your credentials and help position yourself as an expert in a given area.

Help you appear higher in a Google search.

The text in SlideShare presentations gets picked up by Google searches and other search engines. Optimizing the keywords in your presentations can help gain rankings in Google or enable visitors to discover your presentation as they search for related content.

For some tips on how to optimize the search engine optimization (SEO) for your SlideShare presentations, marketing executive A.J. Kohn has some great advice on Quora and an insightful step-by-step experiment he conducted on SlideShare SEO. He determined how tough it was for SlideShare to rank the keyword term “what is bounce rate” by creating a specific presentation around that term.

Enliven your video chats.

Besides just sharing your presentations on SlideShare, you can integrate them with social media in other ways—such as with the Google+ Hangouts app. While having a video chat with Google+ Hangouts, you can also share slides in real-time using the SlideShare app, spicing up your virtual meetings and enhancing collaboration.

Here’s an idea: The next time you webcast using the SlideShare Google+ Hangouts app, throw in some of those fun masks Google launched in March 2012.

Connie Zheng is a PR professional at North of Nine Communications. You can follow her on Twitter at @chasinggodot.

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