This is an Eval Central archive copy, find the original at freshspectrum.com.
A carousel is like a social media slide deck. The format has been around for years, but it’s making a comeback. In today’s post I’ll show you how to create one using Canva.
Do you remember slideshare? Basically it was a site that let you put your slidedecks on the web.
Like a lot of web things, it never really went away. LinkedIn bought it and owned it for a bit, and then recently Scribd bought it from LinkedIn. But for years now you have been able to directly embed PowerPoints and Google Slides, so the tool became a bit redundant.
Social media carousels are like slideshares built into different social media platforms. Posting a handful of photos that you can peruse by scrolling horizontally has been a native feature on tools like Instagram, but it just wasn’t something you would see often on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter.
But that’s changing.
Here is an Example from the United Nations
I’ve seen new carousels popping up all over the place, but here is an example carousel post from the UN. You can find the post on LinkedIn, but they also shared the same post on Twitter and a similar one previously on Instagram.
How to Create a Carousel using Canva
So a carousel is just a sequence of images.
Depending on the social media platform you’ll either share your carousel as a set of images, or in the case of LinkedIn, a PDF.
Luckily with Canva it doesn’t really matter because you can turn any design into a collection of images or a PDF. You have some flexibility on size, but I like just going with a social media square.
Picking and laying out your content.
A lot of the carousels I’ve seen lately are listicles (Buzzfeed style numbered lists).
I decided to do the same thing and share some of my old cartoons. I picked 8 audience favorites from my archives to act as my starting point. My cartoons are rectangles, so the square format will give me some space to caption each one.
I have 8 cartoons but want an intro image and closing image, so that gives me 10 images. My plan is to share this on LinkedIn so that will work just fine. Most platforms have limits on their carousels, so check out the requirements before you design (currently Twitter 6; Facebook 10; Instagram 10; LinkedIn 300!).
On my first page I put in a zoomed in version of one of my cartoons as a background. If you want to actually read the cartoons you’ll need to scroll through the carousel. I also put a big white arrow on the cover because it’s not always immediately obvious on LinkedIn that you’re looking at a carousel.
Think Slidedoc, not Slidedeck
So carousels are more like a slidedoc than a slide deck. You’re not going to be standing in front of them walking through each slide. So it needs to be readable, not just viewable.
This is also meant for social media, so I want any text I use to be pretty large and fairly short. For my cartoon carousel I did a numbered list and put a personal caption under each cartoon.
Download your Carousel
If you’re planning on using the carousel on LinkedIn, you’ll want to download your image set as a standard PDF. If you’re planning on using the carousel on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you’ll want images.
Publishing the Carousel on your Chosen Platform.
Sharing a Carousel on LinkedIn is simple.
You really just click on “Add a document” and then choose your pdf.
- Sharing a Carousel on Instagram is also super easy. You can even make it seamless!
- Sharing a Carousel on Twitter and Facebook are both do-able, but a little more annoying. Especially with Twitter as you can only do it right now through their Ad platform.
Want to see my final cartoon Carousel?
Here it is, I shared it on my LinkedIn account.