Developments in technology have been keeping us on our BrightBull toes. A consensus among other fellow marketers is that keeping up with technology is becoming one of their biggest challenges. So it’s exciting news like this acquisition that makes us very happy – in fact it should make any B2B social media marketer very happy.

A combined estimated 136 million monthly unique visitors now aligning 9 million content uploads with 161 million members, opens up a whole new world of possibilities for us B2B marketers.

I have been fantasising a little about the implications of this deal in our daily social media lives. So I’ve come up with some potential things that might happen in the near future:

1. Single login with your LinkedIn profile.
   We assume that an obvious new feature will be a single login with your LinkedIn profile, making everything easier and effortless
2. Better customer profiling of your slideshare views.
   The basic analytics package built in on slideshare is very basic and completely dependent on how complete other members have their profiles. Now with the potential login through LinkedIn we should be able to have an extended view of each of the views
3. Funkier ways to integrate with other tools within LinkedIn.
   Right now there is no way of sharing content on LinkedIn other than the existing plug-in with slideshare for one’s profile. Can you imagine being able to share presentations, webinars and downloadable pieces directly into groups, Q&A, company profiles etc? It would be a dream. Alternatively, having group features on slideshare like the ones already on LinkedIn will enhance the viewing experience and community sense.
4. Lead generation to be made easier than ever.
   One can already generate leads via slideshare, however any integration with LinkedIn and user profiles should theoretically bring a better quality of contacts and leads into the whole community.
5. Better exposure to your already existing community of contacts.
   Combine both groups of contacts into one single platform – simple, seamless (hopefully) and all will benefit

Obviously we can only speculate at this stage, but whatever happens moving forward it will be sure to make our B2B marketing lives easier – having a better and more robust single channel for companies to share their valuable content in my opinion is a win-win for all. The kind of news we would welcome every day of the week!