GenXJamerican

A friend recommended I post more original content on LinkedIn as I enter the job market this year.  Here’s how I used Claude, Canva, and other tools to create my first LinkedIn carousel post.  First, I prompted Claude to look at my blog archive and curate the best 20 posts with career advice.  Next, I asked Claude to convert one of the recommended posts into a LinkedIn carousel. After manually editing the HTML to update the content for the present, I opened up Canva and added screenshots of the HTML slides to a LinkedIn carousel template.  After downloading the carousel in PDF format, I attached it as a document to a post and shared it with my network.

I’ve been blogging off-and-on for over 20 years, not always about my career, but enough that I expected there would be enough posts I could use as a starting point to share original content on a consistent basis.  Here’s an outline of my initial Claude prompt that could be adapted and applied to any LLM:

<blog archive URL>
Review the provided URL and generate a table with the top <number of posts> links best suited to repurposed as LinkedIn posts.  Each row should have the following columns: link to the blog post, <number of> items of key career advice the post contains, recommendation on whether significant rewriting is needed to make it relevant to the present day.

While I didn’t provide a persona in my prompt, I did provide details on how the response should be structured.  Here is some of Claude’s “thinking” as it built a response to my prompt:

Curated relevant career posts and prioritized content extraction

 

Curated relevant career posts and prioritized content extraction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  
2.  
3.  
4.  
5.  
6.  
7.  
8.  
9.  
10.  
11.  
12.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now let me fetch the key career and leadership posts to understand their content before building the table.

Curated twenty career posts and assessed their modernization requirements

 

Curated twenty career posts and assessed their modernization requirements

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  
2.  
3.  
4.  
5.  
6.  
7.  
8.  
9.  
10.  
11.  
12.  
13.  
14.  
15.  
16.  
17.  
18.  
19.  
20.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I now have enough content from the key posts to build a comprehensive table. Let me compile this into a document.

Curated twenty career-focused posts with relevance assessments and update recommendations

 

Curated twenty career-focused posts with relevance assessments and update recommendations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I have enough content to build the full table. Let me create a nicely formatted HTML file with the table.

Created a file, read a file

 

Created a file, read a file

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's your LinkedIn repurposing table with all 20 posts ranked and analyzed. A few highlights worth calling out:

Ready to post with minimal editing (5 posts): "Navigating the Great Delayering," "Tell Me About Yourself — Engineering Leader Edition," "Software Development Roles: Lead vs. Manager," "Idolatry of Innovators," and "The Problem with Exit Interviews" are all essentially evergreen and could go up this week with only length trimming.

...

Format tip: Several of these (especially #2, #11, and #13) would convert naturally into LinkedIn carousels — the structured advice translates well to a slide-per-point format.

Claude’s response was a nicely-formatted HTML table.  The column with blog post links included the date of the blog post.  The “rewriting needed?” column provided unexpected depth regarding the degree of rewriting needed, recommendations of specific updates to be made, even advice on the best time of year to share a particular post.  The format tip which came just before the HTML table is what sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole to try and create a LinkedIn carousel instead of a traditional post. 

Building on the output of the first prompt, and advice I read elsewhere regarding LinkedIn carousels, my next prompt was this:

As a LinkedIn content specialist, turn the contents of post #2 into a LinkedIn carousel of 5-15 slides in length.

Unlike my initial prompt, I did provide a persona.  The range of slides gave Claude enought flexibility to size the content to a sensible number rather than stretching or cramming it into too many or too few slides.

The HTML version of the carousel looks great—I’ll definitely make future carousels I publish available in that format as well as in LinkedIn.  The main goal was posting on LinkedIn though, so I pressed forward.  On my Mac mini, I used Cmd-Shift-4 to screenshot each HTML slide as a image.  Then I dragged and dropped it into the template pages and resized the images to fit.    After downloading as a PDF (a few times as my final walkthrough of the output revealed some things I wanted to tweak), I uploaded and published the post to my LinkedIn network.  In the future, I’ll make the posts open beyond my LinkedIn network for broader reach.