Carousel post

A sensible carousel runs to five to eight slides. The first one has to work alone, because in the feed people see it as an ordinary image and decide from it whether to swipe. The last slide belongs to whatever you want them to do next. Text is read on a phone, so roughly twenty words per slide and type big enough to read without zooming. Building one is an hour or two of work if you already have the content.

Why companies use it: it is the cheapest way to turn a piece of technical writing into content people actually look at. Six hundred words of a blog post about video production pricing becomes six slides explaining the same thing in thirty seconds. On technical B2B topics a carousel is often the only format where people stay longer than two seconds, because swiping is active and the algorithm notices.

How to build one: write all six sentences into a document first, one per slide, and only then open the design tool. If the sentences do not make sense in sequence as text, design will not rescue them. Every slide needs an open loop, a reason to continue. And keep the look consistent, so a carousel can be assembled in twenty minutes next month rather than designed from scratch.

When it makes no sense: when you have one thing to say. Stretching it over six slides means the first three are padding, and people can tell. Carousels also work badly with photographs and no text, because without a promise on slide one there is no reason to swipe. And on networks dominated by video the same content often performs better as a short clip, so it is worth testing both.

We read every carousel aloud as continuous prose first. If it sounds like something you would say to a client, it works slide by slide too. Try it today: take the last technical piece from your website and write six sentences from it, one per slide.