4_sharing_contentContent sharing networks allow companies to lodge documents - such as press releases, technical papers, presentations, images or videos - and share them with other people, allowing the spread of content to other platforms and thus ensure increasing reach.

The most popular content sharing networks are YouTube, Google Docs, Slideshare and Scribd, which is the reason why I would like to include them in the following:

YouTube: Spreading videos expansively on the Internet

With more than three billion views per day, YouTube is the leading video portal on the Internet. Companies can use YouTube to inform or to entertain their audiences with latest video clips. By creating their free profile on YouTube, companies obtain a unique channel through which they can upload and share videos with other users. On the personal YouTube channel, depending on the setting, all publicly released videos are displayed via the playlist, uploads, and favorites.

YouTube is suitable for the distribution of product presentations, manuals, recordings of press conferences, webinars or interviews. But the best is that videos published on YouTube can be embedded on other websites, too. Thus, they can be shared with other users via social media such as Facebook and Twitter, or be embedded on your own website or your own blog. Since it is possible for all visitors of YouTube to embed videos on other web sites, an extensive distribution is supported.

GoogleDocs: The all-rounder of the content-sharing networks

Google Docs is a service provided by Google that allows companies to upload texts, spread sheets, presentations, forms, and drawings and edit them directly on the Internet. Forms can be sent straight as a survey or as a link to the appropriate online form and GoogleDocs can create from the collected answers automatically statistics that can even be edited. As with all content sharing networks, posted content can be published for different user groups. Thus, companies can share their documents privately, only to specific users, or to the public on the Internet. Publicly accessible content can also be found in the search engines. In addition, it can be set whether other users should have the permission to edit the uploaded content or not. In that way, companies have an opportunity to develop interesting content in teams or in collaboration with business partners and customers. Further, Google Docs offer a chat that businesses can use to communicate with their contacts.

SlideShare: All presentations on one portal

Slideshare allows companies to create a free profile as well and is a content sharing network where you can upload presentations from PowerPoint and PDF files. Users can decide whether they mark the presentations as private or share them with the public. If a presentation is marked as public, other users can find the content on SlideShare, too. Besides that, SlideShare offers several other ways to share presentations, such as saving them on social bookmarking directories, sending them via e-mail to business partners, customers and journalists, or embedding them with an HTML code on the own corporate website. Publicly shared presentations on SlideShare can also be found via search engines, and businesses can even help to improve the visibility and detectability of content in the search engines by adding topics relevant tags to their presentations.

Scribd: The library on the Web

Of course, companies can set up a free profile on Scribd as well, which allows to upload, read, edit, and delete documents. Scribd supports the most common file types such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Uploaded documents can be release to the public on the Internet, allowing other users of Scribd to see the posted documents and find them through the internal search. As usual, the release of the documents on Scribd also ensures that the content appears in the search engines. And in order to increase the ranking in the search engines, companies can allocate a description to each document and assign it to a category that fits the content. In addition, documents that are on Scribd can be included in the company's website, Scribd even generates an HTML code that can be added to the company's website, in order to embed the content.

Content sharing networks are a great way to reach your target audience directly. Just some interesting information in the form of press releases, white papers, technical papers, or presentations is needed. The regular publication of content on content sharing networks ensures rapid spread of information on the Internet and a good visibility in the search engines. Not to mention that for an effective distribution of documents and videos via content sharing networks, a concurrent publication on multiple social media profiles is helpful.

By Daniela La Marca