LinkedIn carousels (aka documents) are an incredible tool for engagement and education – as the algorithm rewards content that people spend time on with increased reach and impressions.

Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is brimming with insights (it is also brimming with cringe braggadocio nonsense – but we’re trying to help businesses avoid that)

When trying to grow your business or personal profile on LinkedIn, you may be tricked—by a man basically yelling at you to buy his course in a short-form video—into thinking you have to post constantly, use a list of engineered prompts, and bait people into engaging with hot takes and unusual questions.

But that simply isn’t necessary.

For the most part, people head to LinkedIn to stay updated within their industry, learn something from their peers, and like any other social platform – be entertained.

One of the best ways to build your audience on LinkedIn is carousel posts.

They allow for complete creative control of design, branding, font choice etc. and make use of preexisting files such as PowerPoints or Canva slide shows. Dimensions don’t hold you back, as they accommodate a lot of different-sized creative, and you can use visuals to draw attention to your content.

At Empire9 we are massive advocates for getting the most milage out of what you’ve got – and LinkedIn carousels are a great way to do it. This blog might even make it into a carousel! You should follow us on LinkedIn to find out…

What is a carousel?

Think of a carousel on LinkedIn as more of a presentation or slide show than a photo album. Each slide needs to make links to the one prior, and encourage the user to click through to the next.

They are incredible formats to deduce high levels of text and information into a singular post without the user being confronted with a massive wall of text.

You know someone who whacks a mega-paragraph on LinkedIn (they feels suspiciously ChatGPT-like) and the sheer length of it becomes off-putting enough to continue the scroll – value be damned! The carousel, might have been the way you would have read it all… just in wee bite-sized pieces.

Why do users like them so much?

Visual diversification is so key to the answer here – as users see similar template-style posts on repeat (you know the kind with the clickbait first sentence and then a million well-spaced sentences underneath…) and then a carousel comes along, and it’s a breath of fresh air.

In the same way we’d rather look at an infographic than digest a research paper and it’s diagrams or charts, we’d rather approach a topic one slide at a time. Especially if it is more visually appealing than a dozen bullet points and a photo of someone on a sales call.

What kind of content is useful in carousel format?

Use carousels to stand out from the crowd. Pack them with useful information – not hot takes that aren’t hot, or personal tips and tricks that are nothing but the industry standard.

Lists and countdowns are great carousel content, and so are your pre-existing blogs. Given that you can upload 100s of pages to a carousel document you aren’t as restricted as you are by character count of a typical post (but please don’t upload a 300 page carousel… no one is going to read all that)

TLDR? Here’s the hitlist

To make a carousel on LinkedIn (which you should because they are great for engagement) you’ll need:

• Your own content in a document file (PDF, PowerPoint, or DOC/DOCX no image files will work)
• Maximum 300 pages (please do less than 10 unless you know your audience well)
• File size of less than 100MB (or it won’t upload)
• When starting your post, click the plus button and select add document. Make sure your caption isn’t too long and encourages readership as well as engagement. No pressure you got this.

Your content should be visually engaging, genuinely informative or entertaining, and of course utilise CTAs to ensure that juicy engagement rate.

Tag us in your next carousel and we will do better than just commenting “great insights” or the rocketship emoji. We promise to be better than that!

See ya online! – Empire9.