We had a little hissy-fit rant about Scribd a while back. I’d like to formally apologise for shooting my mouth off too early.
Scribd has added new features – and they look pretty useful for content creators.
The main thing that has been added is Analytics. Scribd has made a dashboard that looks a lot like google analytics.
It includes helpful data on:
- Document views by day graph
- Document “reads”, “Embed reads”, “Readcasts” and an overall engagement score
- Views by region / geography
- Search key words
- Top referrers
Which begins to make the service look more useful as a business development tool.
Business model revised
It seems that Scribd has revised its “free to anyone” business model to one based more on “Give and take”. When it first launched there was little difference between Scribd and Slideshare – both enabled documents to be uploaded and shared. And its sign-up self-promotion annoyed me.
Recently I was tempted back by a search that linked to a great document upload. And I found that Scribd now has refined its business model. You can read any document free. But if you want to download one – you have to reciprocate by uploading one of your own.
I wonder if it keeps tabs on the number of uploads / downloads each user does…. maybe I should keep a list of future documents to upload but not until I’ve found one I want to download.
Anyone else tried it out?
New Business Development
If yoiu are using content creation as part of your business development tactics this is pretty handy.
- First – ensure you have lots of links into your website from any documents you upload
- Second – add to Scribd any of the e-books, how-to manuals and expert guides that you have on your blog or website
- Third – use good tags and key words to describe them in the upload
- Fourth – come back and check for views / downloads and other analytics.
Related posts:
- So what is it with Scribd?
- Using Twitter for Business Development…. part 3
- Useful Firefox plugins for Business Development
- How to harness energy and engagement for business development
- My challenge – practice business development
