Scribd Quickly Catching on to the Social Networking Scene, By Mark Bove’
Copywriting, Guerrilla Marketing, Marketing techniques, words that sell ideas No Comments »Scribd is a social networking website that is catching on at a rather quick pace which allows anyone to publish their documents and images and make them available for the World Wide Web. With Scribd you can easily turn almost any type of file such as PDF, Word Document, or Excel Document into a web document that can be viewed for the entire online world. Scribd offers the perfect solution for those that do not have a website and makes sharing your thoughts with the world a breeze.
Scribd has over 35 billion words in its arsenal which means it is many times bigger than such free publication sites as Wikipedia and others. The site has over 10 million documents publishes and boasts tens of millions of reader and viewers each and every month. So how do you get involved?
Membership to Scribd is free and creating an account is as easy as a few simple steps. Once you create your account you are given a number of ways in which to upload your files such as:
Copy and paste your text documents.
Type in the URL of existing work you have published on the web so long as you own the rights to it.
Upload files directly from your hard drive.
Use your desktop upload tool to publish multiple files at the same time.
Once you begin to contribute to scribe you can build a personal profile and then begin to build your social networking community. You can find others with similar tastes and interests and subscribe to their work and share thoughts, ideas, and even leave your comments. Others in turn will begin to subscribe to your works should they be interesting enough and they may even use some of your information in their own websites. Plus, published documents on Scribd are typically indexed rather quickly by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ping. It all boils down to your published work having the ability to go viral in a very big way provided it is good quality work.
This not only means increased opportunities for individuals spreading the word about their work, it also gives internet marketers in the know a distinct advantage. Internet marketers can use Scribd as a whole new source of social networking leads and find others that are interested in what their clients have to offer. By carefully matching content with members, a win, win situation can occur as a member will get something they have been looking for and the internet marketer’s client gains further exposure.
As with any other social networking website that is online today, Scribd has some finer points and some not so finer points. Here is a breakdown:
THE GOOD
Use of iPaper: Scribd uses a technology that is powered by Adobe Flash called iPaper. iPaper allows document to be embedded on web pages much in the same way as videos from YouTube. What this means for you is that you do not have to know any fancy computer lingo, download any software, nor do you have to have a website in order to publish your work. With Scribd you can publish your work with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Privacy Settings: With Scribd, you decide who can and cannot view your files. You can choose to share a document with the entire world, or limit it to certain members within the site community; it is all up to you. You can set different parameters for each article or you can set a blanket parameter for all.
No Commitment: Once you decide that you no longer want your files to be viewed, you can easily remove them from Scribd. You can keep files active for a day or forever; again, the choice is yours.
THE BAD
Searchablity: Scribd is a bit unorganized and it is sometimes difficult to find what it is you are looking for. Scribd continues to make strides in this department and has various ways to navigate through the website, but you are usually left with a good number of things to sift through before you find what you are after.
Plain site: Compared to other social networking sites, Scribd is not all that flashy. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, some may view it as a negative.
Scribd is relatively new when it comes to social networking and has only been around since 2007. But the website and its community continue to grow by leaps and bounds. With the ease of uploading documents and the growing number of members it is easy to see why Scribd is rapidly catching on in the ever popular world of social networking.
