A carousel idea for LinkedIn refers to creating a post that utilizes LinkedIn’s carousel feature to showcase multiple images, videos, or links in a slideshow format. Carousels allow you to share more content and visuals in a compact, engaging way on LinkedIn. When used strategically, carousels can capture attention, convey information visually, and prompt interaction from your connections.
Why Use Carousels on LinkedIn?
There are several key benefits to using carousels for your LinkedIn content:
Stand Out in the Feed
Carousels add visual interest to your LinkedIn feed and help your posts stand out. The sliding images and media instantly catch the eye as connections scroll through updates. This gives your content an advantage in terms of visibility and stopping power.
Share More Per Post
With carousels, you can include up to 10 slides per post, allowing you to convey more information, examples, or media in a single update. This allows you to tell more of a story or showcase a range of products, services, tips, or ideas in one post.
Engagement
Carousels tend to generate high engagement as connections click through the slides. Each slide acts as a separate piece of clickable content. This provides more opportunities for likes, comments, and shares per post.
Calls to Action
You can use carousel cards strategically to encourage connections to take action, like visiting your website, downloading content, registering for an event, contacting sales, etc. The multiple touchpoints allow you to promote calls to action repeatedly.
Types of Carousels to Create
When brainstorming carousel post ideas, consider these popular and effective carousel styles and types:
Product or Service Showcase
Use slides to demonstrate or showcase various products, services, or features your company offers. For example, an accounting software company could showcase their platform modules – accounts receivable, invoice processing, reporting, etc.
Event Highlights
For conferences, webinars, and other events, create a carousel highlighting speaker sessions, agenda, venue images, etc. to generate buzz pre-event and recap highlights post-event.
Infographics
Break up key data, stats, flowcharts, and infographics into carousel cards to convey information in a visual and digestible way. Infographics tend to perform very well in carousel posts.
How-To Tutorials
For step-by-step guides and tutorials, a carousel can take the viewer through different stages and procedures, from start to finish. Number each step clearly in its own slide.
Employee Highlights
Humanize your brand and showcase your team by featuring different employees in individual slides with photos, quotes, and job duties.
Customer Testimonials
Influence potential customers by sharing positive quotes and feedback from current clients via a carousel post. Ensure you have permission to use their names/images.
Behind-the-Scenes
Offer an insider’s view of your company, products, and services by creating a “behind the scenes” carousel. This gives your audience a look at what goes on backstage.
Photo Galleries
For visual industries like photography, design, architecture, or travel, create carousels to display portfolios of images followers can flip through on LinkedIn.
Best Practices for LinkedIn Carousels
Follow these best practices when creating and sharing carousels on LinkedIn for optimal results:
Lead with a Strong Image
The first carousel slide image that viewers see in their feed is crucial. Use eye-catching, bold visuals and graphics to capture attention.
Keep Text Concise
Since slides are viewed in quick succession, use minimal text – keep bullet points short, headlines snappy, and captions 1-2 lines. Avoid big blocks of text.
Consistency Across Slides
Maintain a consistent look, feel, font, colors, and messaging across all slides for a cohesive flow. Vary imagery but keep other elements aligned.
Utilize Varied Media
Incorporate photos, graphics, logos, charts, videos, gifs, and more into slides to add variety and interactivity. But ensure a logical flow between media types.
Strategic Calls-to-Action
Place your most important CTA on the final slide when viewers are fully engaged. Use arrows, color contrast, and clear directional language to lead them to take action.
Link to Landing Pages
Where relevant, link carousel slides to landing pages on your website for viewers to continue engaging with your content or offers.
| Slide Number | Media Type | Text | Linked Page |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Photo | Snappy headline, 1-2 line caption | /products |
| 2 | Infographic | Key data points | /resources |
| 3 | Video | Testimonial quote | /customer-stories |
| 4 | GIF | Behind-the-scenes | N/A |
| 5 | Photo | Strong CTA | /contact-sales |
Track Performance
Use LinkedIn’s analytics to track engagement and clicks on your carousels. Review insights to identify high-performing slides and optimize future posts.
Creative Carousel Ideas
Here are some creative examples of carousels you could produce on LinkedIn:
“Meet Our Team” Carousel
Introduce connections to your staff with individual profile slides including headshot, name, role and a quote or fun fact about each employee.
“Behind the Scenes” Carousel
Give viewers a look inside your company culture by featuring photos of office spaces, events, offsite activities, and employees collaborating.
“How We Help” Carousel
Showcase the journey your product or service takes customers on through numbered steps or flowchart-style graphics.
“By the Numbers” Carousel
Use minimal text and bold graphics and visuals to highlight key company metrics – like years in business, customers served, growth rate, etc.
“Client Spotlight” Carousel
In individual slides, showcase logos and testimonials from some of your top customers. This social proof builds trust and credibility.
“Recent Press” Carousel
Display branded screenshots of your recent press coverage, news mentions, awards, and media placements.
“Industry Trends” Carousel
Create engaging infographics examining data and insights around trends in your industry – great thought leadership content.
“Level Up Your Skills” Carousel
For professional development posts, provide tips, examples, tools or resources for developing skills in slides – ex. leadership, communication, time management, etc.
3 LinkedIn Carousel Examples
Studying examples of successful carousel posts on LinkedIn can provide inspiration. Here are 3 great carousel post examples from companies leveraging the format effectively:
Microsoft
Microsoft uses carousels extensively to showcase their suite of products and services. This example post demonstrates the features of their Microsoft 365 platform in a digestible visual format:
DesignHill
Design services company DesignHill incorporated customer testimonials into their “Client Love” carousel post, using different client logos and quotes on each shareable slide:
Hootsuite
This simple but eye-catching carousel from Hootsuite uses bold stats, icons, and captions to highlight “Social Media Usage & Engagement” research data:
Tools to Create LinkedIn Carousels
You don’t need advanced design skills to create compelling carousels. Here are some user-friendly tools for DIY carousel production:
LinkedIn’s Carousel Creator
LinkedIn’s native carousel creation tool allows you to easily upload images, arrange slides, and add text within the post editor.
Canva
Canva has carousel templates allowing you to quickly build slides with professional layouts. Simply edit the text and images provided.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark’s free online design app has a dedicated carousel maker with plenty of customization options to create your own.
SlideDog
SlideDog lets you take existing slides or images and turn them into carousels. You can also add music, record audio narration, and more.
Animoto
Animoto offers templates and easy drag-and-drop creation to build video carousels up to 60 seconds long, optimized for LinkedIn.
Easil
Easil has pre-made carousel templates you can edit and adapt, along with plenty of backgrounds, icons, and design elements.
Conclusion
From highlighting products and thought leadership content to event promotion and employee features, carousels provide an engaging way to share diverse visual content with your LinkedIn connections.
Strategically incorporating carousels into your LinkedIn marketing mix can help captivate your target audience, prompt interaction, convey information visually, and drive traffic to your website – helping achieve your brand’s objectives on the platform.
Following best practices like strong images, concise text, strategic CTAs, and performance tracking will maximize your carousel impact. Studying examples and leveraging user-friendly design tools makes producing compelling, on-brand carousels accessible for brands of all sizes.
So next time you plan a LinkedIn update, consider going carousel for a post that grabs attention, inspires action, and delivers results.
