LinkedIn SlideShare gets custom curation tools

LinkedIn introduced a feature to its SlideShare slide-hosting platform today that helps you find, save and curate important or interesting content. The new Clipping tool lets you save the best slides within presentations and then organize them into separate topic-based Clipboards. And people can share individual slides and entire Clipboards across their networks.

SlideShare currently has 70 million monthly active users, and the amount of content stored on the platform nearly doubled since LinkedIn acquired the company in 2012. Slides and presentations on SlideShare include everything from analyst and venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s annual Internet trends report to advice or commentary from other everyday professionals. LinkedIn says 400,000 presentations are uploaded to SlideShare every month, and there are more than 35 topic categories on the platform.

“In the past three years we’ve grown our content from about 10 million pieces of content to 18 million pieces of content,” says Alexis Baird, senior product manager at LinkedIn.

[Related Feature: Why you shouldn’t accept every LinkedIn connection]

LinkedIn SlideShare is one of the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet, and much of the engagement on the platform comes from outside the United States, according to Baird. Search drives 80 percent of SlideShare’s traffic overall, and the company hopes that number will grow as more users take advantage of the new Clipping tool.

“It works across a variety of use cases,” Baird says of the new feature. “It’s a great resource for people to build their own personal professional brand in a way that’s a little more lightweight than creating original content.”