A carousel is the one format where the reader does the work: nothing happens until they swipe. That is a strength, because someone who swipes is paying attention, and a weakness, because every slide has to give them a reason to do it again.
The first slide is the headline
- Say what the carousel will give them, in a few large words. “Five checks before you schedule” beats “Some thoughts on scheduling”.
- Make it readable at thumbnail size. If you cannot read it on a phone held at arm’s length, it is too small.
- Promise something you will actually deliver in the slides that follow.
One idea per slide
Crowding two points onto a slide makes people stop to read, and a stopped swipe is often a lost one. Keep each slide to a single thought, in as few words as will carry it, and let the picture or the layout do the rest.
A shape that works
- 1The promise: what the reader will know by the end.
- 2The steps, the points or the story, one to a slide.
- 3A piece of proof: a real example, a number you can stand behind, a photo of the result.
- 4A last slide that says what to do next.
Make the last slide useful
People who reach the end are your most interested readers, so give them somewhere to go: a question to answer in the comments, a link on your profile, a reminder to save the post for later. A last slide that only says “thanks for reading” wastes the moment.
Practical things that are easy to get wrong
- Keep the same size, margins and fonts on every slide so the set feels like one object.
- Keep important words well inside the edges, because the feed may crop the first slide differently from the rest.
- There is a limit on how many slides a carousel can hold, and it has changed before, so check the current figure instead of trusting an old article — ours included.
Swipe through your own carousel on a phone before you post it. Wherever you wanted to stop reading, a reader will have stopped sooner.