How to Create LinkedIn Carousels for Posts

LinkedIn has experienced remarkable growth in the past year, leading some experts like Guy Kawasaki to suggest that LinkedIn should position itself as the next Twitter. The statistics below support this growth:

• 40% of users engage with company pages every month.
• LinkedIn Pages that post weekly have 5.6x more followers than those that post monthly, and their following grows 7x faster.
• LinkedIn members are viewing 22% more feed updates and having 25% more public conversations YoY.
• Between June 2020 and June 2022, LinkedIn members shared 25% more public content YoY.

Which type of content is booming on LinkedIn?

There are various options available for posting on LinkedIn, ranging from standard posts and images/videos to polls, documents, and events. In recent times, LinkedIn has witnessed a surge in post updates and engagement, with one particular area showing great potential – LinkedIn carousels. But, wait, don’t confuse these with carousel ads that can be created within LinkedIn. In this article, we’ll be focusing on PDF documents that can be uploaded and viewed on LinkedIn with just a simple click on the arrow beside the “image”. The example below is from HubSpot who have been relentlessly using them over the past few months (just check out the engagement stats below the post). 

So, let’s dive in and explore the power of PDF carousels on LinkedIn! 

Creating the content

Whilst there are a few applications that you can be using to create these PDF carousels, such as PowerPoint, we will focus on Canva as it offers ease-of-use and simplicity. So, the first thing we need to do is head over to Canva and create a new design. The dimensions for this will be 1080 pixels x 1080, though you could try other sizes (as long as they are square). You can either start off with a blank canvas or select a design from their templates. I found quite a few by looking at the templates they had for Instagram posts which, incidentally, will also be square in shape.

Here’s some sample templates from Canva:

This template consists of seven slides and come obviously, you can modify all aspects of it – from colour and font to even adding in your own images. One tip that I would give you is to make sure that you give the design a logical name so you can find it in future and, if you want, make a copy of it and reuse it.

Downloading the content

Once you are happy with your design the next thing you need to do is to download it. Here are the steps involved:

1. Click on the share button in the top right corner and then download. You will then be presented with another pop-up and in file format you need to change the file format from PNG to PDF (best for printing). You then have the option to select all pages for printing or just the ones that you require. Click download.

Uploading the content to LinkedIn

The final part is to add the content to LiniedIn. When you go to publish to LinkedIn you will see that the posting option will look along these lines (it will obviously look different if you post on groups or personal profiles):

The option for document uploads can’t be seen here and that is why you need to click “start a post”. You will then see this dialogue box and you need to click the file icon to upload:

Once you have selected the file from your computer, you should then add a descriptive title to your document. This is important as it will be displayed in the header of the carousel. And that, is that!