How to post a PDF carousel on LinkedIn

What a document post is, and why everyone calls it a carousel

A document post is a normal LinkedIn post with a file attached. A PDF is the usual choice, and slide and word processor files are accepted too, converted to the same thing. In the feed the file is not a download link. It becomes a viewer: page one shows as the cover, and readers swipe or click through the rest without leaving the feed.

Instagram has a native carousel. LinkedIn does not. It uses that word for one of its ad formats, and the organic version everyone means is a document. The name stuck because the reading experience is identical, which is why almost every search for a LinkedIn carousel returns instructions for uploading a PDF. When you go looking for the control while writing a post, look for the word document.

Two things follow from this being a file rather than a set of native slides, and both catch people out.

The pages behave like pictures. Do not count on a link inside the file being clickable, or on the words inside it being selectable or searchable. Anything that has to be clicked or found belongs in the post text.

The file is fixed once published. You can edit the post text after publishing, but you cannot swap the document. A typo on page three costs you the whole post: fix it, repost, and lose whatever the first one had gathered.

How to post one, step by step

1. Make the PDF. One page per slide, portrait or square, around eight to twelve pages. Any tool that exports a PDF works, including your slide software, as long as you change the page size before you start designing.
2. Read it on your phone before you upload it. Open the file on the kind of device your audience reads on, hold it at normal distance, and note every page you have to squint at. This single step catches most of what goes wrong.
3. Start a post and choose the document option. On desktop it sits behind the plus or the more control in the compose box, labeled add a document. The mobile app puts it in the same place. Pick your file.
4. Write a real title. LinkedIn asks for one, and will happily use your file name if you do not give it something better. The title shows on the card in the feed, right where a scroller is deciding whether to stop, so a document called deck-v3-final is a wasted line in the most valuable spot you have.
5. Write the post text. The first two lines are all anyone sees before the see more link, so put the point there rather than a warm-up. If you have a link, it goes here, not in the file.
6. Post it, then look at it on a phone. The feed shows your cover far smaller than your design tool did, and that view is the one that counts.

The upload itself takes a minute. Everything that decides how the post does happened before it, in the file.

The format rules that actually matter

Most advice on this is a long list of specifications. Four of them change how the post performs. The rest is housekeeping.

• Portrait or square, never landscape. Slide software hands you a wide page by default, and a wide page in a phone feed is a thin strip with unreadable text inside it. Design at 1080 by 1350 pixels for portrait, or 1080 by 1080 for square. Square is the safe default; portrait takes more of the screen and rewards a design that holds up.
• Around eight to twelve pages. LinkedIn's own limit is far higher, in the region of 300 pages and 100 MB, and it is beside the point. Attention runs out long before the file does. Twenty pages of material is two posts.
• Text bigger than feels right. On a 1080 by 1350 page, a headline wants to be roughly 90 pixels tall and body text no smaller than about 40. If that looks enormous on your monitor, remember the page will be about the size of a playing card in someone's hand.
• The cover is the whole hook. It is the only page most people will ever see, because it is the only one that appears without a deliberate swipe. It has to say what the reader gets, in a few words, legibly, at thumbnail size. A cover carrying a logo, a title in small type and a stock photo is the most common way a good carousel dies.

Page numbers, a swipe cue on the cover, a tidy closing page: all worth doing, none of them decisive.

How to design pages that read on a phone

The constraint is not taste, it is size. Assume every page is read at arm's length, on a screen the width of a palm, inside a moving list of other things.

• One idea per page. If a page has two things on it, it has one too many. Splitting costs nothing: pages are cheap, attention is not.
• Under about twenty five words a page. A page you have to read, rather than take in at a glance, is where people stop swiping.
• Contrast, and nothing subtle. Dark text on a light page or light text on a dark one. Mid gray on a mid color looks considered on a large screen and vanishes on a small one.
• Keep everything away from the edges. Leave a wide margin on all four sides so nothing that matters sits where a crop or a rounded corner can reach it.
• Repeat two things on every page. One typeface and one color from your real brand, in the same position each time. That repetition is what makes a set of pages read as one document instead of a folder of images.
• Give the run of pages a shape. A cover that promises something, one page on why it matters, four to eight pages doing the work with a single idea each, a page that sums up, and a last page with one specific next step. A carousel that ends without an ask ends with a shrug.

If you put text over a photograph, set it on a solid or darkened block rather than straight onto the picture. Legibility on a phone beats the version that looks better on your monitor.

When a carousel beats a plain post, and what wastes one

A carousel is not a better post. It is a different shape, and it wins in one case: when the idea has parts that follow each other. Steps, a before and after, a teardown, five numbers with a point each, a framework. Turning pages does real work there, and what you end up with is something people save and send to someone else.

A plain text post wins more often than founders expect. It takes minutes rather than an hour, the words are visible with nothing to click, links work, and a strong single idea is not improved by being cut into nine pieces. If you can say it in four lines, say it in four lines. Where those come from is in LinkedIn post ideas for founders.

The reason this format gets pushed so hard is that swiping holds someone on a post longer than reading a paragraph does, and time spent is something feeds pay attention to. Treat that as a reasonable explanation for why carousels have worked, not as a promise that yours will. Feeds change, and a format that works partly because it is uncommon works less well as everyone adopts it.

The mistakes that waste the effort are consistent.

• A cover that is a title page. Your company name is not a hook.
• A slide deck uploaded as it is. Investor slides are built to be talked over. With nobody narrating, half of them mean nothing.
• Landscape pages. The most common one of all, and it is a default rather than a decision.
• Thirty pages. Nobody reaches the end. Everything after the tenth page is decoration.
• The good part on page nine. Front load it, and assume most readers see one page.
• A link that exists only inside the file.
• A file name left to do the title's job.

None of these are writing problems. They all come from forgetting that the reader is holding a phone and deciding in about a second.

Making the file without designing it yourself

Everything above is a design job as much as a writing one, and that is the part most founders quietly abandon after the second carousel.

Posts produces exactly this format. You pick carousel, approve the story arc it proposes, written in your own subject matter rather than in general advice, and it renders finished pages and one PDF, which is the file this guide has been describing. The pages come out in the brand colors from your design lock with the fonts embedded, and your real logo file is placed on the image rather than drawn by a model. Alt text is written for you.

Three things it does on purpose are worth knowing. A page can carry a chart, one large number, or a single icon, and the model only picks which; the renderer draws it, and any figure that cannot be matched to your research or to the words on the page is dropped instead of published. Text is laid over the pictures by the browser, so it stays sharp and legible rather than the near-words an image model paints. Nine pages is the cap for LinkedIn, which sits at the top of the range this guide recommends anyway.

The price is on the approve button before you approve, nothing is charged until you do, and that price is a ceiling rather than an estimate. From there you can publish to LinkedIn from inside the product, or take the PDF and upload it yourself with the steps above.