A free Apple Keynote template for your LinkedIn posts
LinkedIn has a carousel feature that takes a PDF and presents it to users as a series of images to swipe through. It’s quite a useful feature if you want to tell a story in a more visual style or present information to support an argument in a post.
You can use design tools to create these, and most of mine are built using Affinity Designer and Publisher. However, if you’d rather use what’s already installed on your MacBook or iPad there’s good news.
You can use Apple Keynote presentations on LinkedIn
Keynote is Apple’s take on Microsoft PowerPoint, and for my money is a simpler and easier to use tool. It’s free with your iCloud account, and you can download apps on to your Apple devices. Like PowerPoint, you create a new presentation using a theme that sets out fonts, backgrounds, placements and so on. Like PowerPoint, none of these are suitable for sharing on LinkedIn.
After experimenting, I designed what I think is an ideal starting point template for creating a Keynote to share on LinkedIn. It’s oriented to portrait (shorter side on the top), 600 x 800 pixels in size (based on looking at how LinkedIn resizes the PDFs) and uses large fonts to make for easier reading on smaller screens (in particular mobile phones).
Use this as a starting point for your own LinkedIn social media stories
This is a basic starting point. You can use it as it comes if you like the minimal aesthetic – it will work fine. Or you can restyle the slide layouts to add your own fonts, colours, branding and images. You can also add your own layouts, such as a standard “this is who I am” slide. The choice is entirely yours.
Once you’ve got it looking the way you like, save the file as a “Theme”. This gives you a base template to create new presentations from. Then you add new slides just as you would any other presentation.
All of this you can do on your MacBook or iPad. In fact I’ve used my iPad to create a couple of further themes from this base one while I was watching TV.
If you’ve not used Apple Keynote before, you’ll find it’s quite simple compared to PowerPoint, but you can get some excellent results. The user guide is on the Apple website for both iPad and Mac, and you can download it from the App Store.
Sharing on LinkedIn
Once you’ve finished designing the presentation you want to share, export it to a PDF [Mac or iPad] and save to your device.
Create a new post on LinkedIn and choose “Add Document”. Upload your PDF and follow the instructions (they have a habit of changing from time to time). Once posted, the PDF is converted to a slideshow of jpeg images for users to scroll through.
If you want to share a single slide, export it as an image and upload it to a post as you would a photo or other graphic.
Download the template
You can download the template by clicking this link.
It’s in the public domain, so feel free to use it as you see fit. No acknowledgement necessary, but if you would like to say thanks, or share what you’ve created with it, you’ll find me on LinkedIn.
My name is Ross Hori
I'm a freelance writer, designer and photographer. By day I create articles, features and reports. At night I take photos and write fiction. Find out more.
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