From Slides to Social Media Movies: Increase Your PowerPoint ROI by Recycling Key Content

Reduce, reuse, recycle. You hear it a lot these days. Wouldn’t it be great if you could apply it to your PowerPoint presentations? After all, you’ve most likely put a lot of brainpower, time and energy into their creation. Wouldn’t it be nice to increase your return on investment?There is a way, and the best news is you can do it all right from PowerPoint. Now, your presentations can be turned into video content for your social media channels like YouTube, Facebook or your corporate blog with very little effort and even less technical know-how.

First, decide which of your slides are appropriate for public consumption. If you need to, remove any classified content. Then, choose the slides that will play best on social media. Think short and to the point.

Next, make your slides even more social-media-friendly by adding animation, narration, or even music (some great clips are available at our favorite stock site iStockphoto.com). This needs to be done in PowerPoint before the next step.

Now you’re ready to turn your slides into video. If you’re using Microsoft Office 2010 (and you likely are as it is the most ubiquitous business software on the market), open the PowerPoint file where your golden content lives. Now convert the file from a PowerPoint (.pptx) to a Windows Media Video file (.wmv) via the FILE/SAVE AND SEND/CREATE A VIDEO function. (Learn more about the process directly from Microsoft).

In a matter of minutes, you’ll have a video of your PowerPoint presentation which is ready for uploading to the social media platform of your choosing. See below for sample.

It’s easy to turn your best presentations into film to be shared with a wider audience via your social media channels. Martin Scorsese eat your heart out.

Using video in your posts will give them more punch and increase your ROI on your PowerPoint slides. So before you consider your next big presentation event a wrap, review your slides to see which of them can be reduced, reused and recycled.

Raquel Baetz helps businesses create content that customers make time to read. She has more than 20 years of experience writing and editing for both digital and print. Connect with Raquel on LinkedIn.