The previous four parts of this series all focused on the process of creating slides and writing talks. But what’s next, now that you’ve given a successful presentation with your very own beautiful slide deck? In this post, I’ve collected tips for how to share your slides with the world, including some of the tools and techniques I use.

🎨 Part 1: Design tips for beginners ✨ Part 2: All about aesthetics 🛠️ Part 3: Technical content 🧩 Part 4: Design elements 💌 Part 5: Sharing your presentations

Disclaimer (since my previous post also got widely shared outside of my circles): This blog post series is not intended as a general-purpose guide to making universally good slides. It mostly collects some tips based on how I make my slides, which are quite specific and targeted to a certain type of conference, talk style and audience. I get a lot of questions from people who like my slides and want to do something similar for their talks, which is what inspired this post.

Uploading your slides

I’ve been using Speaker Deck pretty much since I started public speaking. The basic plan is free and turns your PDFs into a digital slideshow, with options to add your title and abstract. The pro plan for $80 a year adds the ability to include an embedded video link for talk recordings and add further links and resources (see here for an example). It also lets you publish your slides with a private link, which I often use to share work in progress with others. If giving talks and presentations is part of your job or something you enjoy, I highly recommend giving the pro features a try!

Alternative options are Slideshare or simply a Google Drive or Dropbox link with the PDF. If you used Google Slides to make your presentation, you also get a shareable link out of the box.

Before sharing your presentation, convert it to a PDF document with each stage of your animations as separate slides. This ensures that everyone can view your slides as they were intended, and that viewers can click through them just like you did during your presentation. I typically already have the PDF ready when I give my talk, in case there are technical problems and I can’t present with Keynote on my own laptop.

Sharing your slides on social media

As I mentioned in a part 2 of this series, having clear and punchy statement slides increases the likelihood of audience members snapping photos during your presentation and sharing them online. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback this way, so I always check my mentions on social media after a talk and read, like or share what others have said.

After a conference, I share my Speaker Deck link with a screenshot of the title slide or a small collage of my favorite or of the most representative slides. I sometimes also combine it with my event roundups and recaps where I summarize the highlights and most interesting takeaways from the conference.

Posting about a conference talk is also a great way to support the organizers and thank them for inviting you. I often do one post in the lead-up to a conference to let people know I’m speaking, and one afterwards to share my slides and experiences. Once the video recording of my talk is live, I update my deck on Speaker Deck to include the embedded video (which is a feature available on the pro plan).

Talk summary threads

In addition to sharing my presentation links, I often include a summary of the talk’s most important points. You can even go one step further and prepare a thread for a platform like Bluesky or Mastodon that summarizes each slide, like I’ve done for PyCon Colombia or EuroPython in the past.

This takes more work, but it’s also a great exercise! Condensing each point into 300 characters or less helped me a lot during my practice. I sometimes also use Keynote’s presenter notes feature to add slide summaries as I write my talks, which I can then reuse for social media or even for a blog post later on (see below).

LinkedIn carousels

Carousels are LinkedIn’s native post format for PDFs, which you can upload from the post composer. Rumor has it that the platform awards native carousel posts with more reach and penalizes posts with external links (which is why you often see people post links in comments). However, this frequently changes, so I wouldn’t overthink it. I usually focus on the content of my posts, rather than over-optimizing for the platform and reach.

Other ideas

Convert talks into blog posts

Writing a good talk takes a significant amount of time and effort, so the content you create shouldn’t be limited to those who could make it to your presentation in person! Plus, not everyone likes flicking through slides or watching video recordings, so blog posts are a great alternative.

For example, I published blog post versions of my talks on the history of the web and human-in-the-loop distillation, and wrote up the “window-knocking machine test”, a point I’d included in several talks to illustrate how to imagine technology of the future and why it’s important to think beyond chat bots.

If your writing process included presenter notes or a talk script, you can use it as the foundation of your blog post. Another bonus is that you’ll be able to reuse any graphics and visualizations you’ve already created for your slides. You can either include screenshots of whole slides, or extract the individual graphics. I typically create a copy of my presentation in Keynote, remove the background, logo and other elements, and then screenshot the graphic to use in my post.

Add your talks to your website

If you have a personal website or portfolio, include a list of your previous and upcoming talks! I have a list of selected talks on this website and we also publish past and future events like talks, workshops and podcast interviews on the Explosion website.

For each talk, I include a link to the slides and recording, if available, and I’ve also added options for written summaries and further resources. Implementation-wise, it’s a simple and responsive HTML table, which is automatically generated from a JSON file:

{
    "date": "2024-06-15",
    "title": "Taking LLMs out of the black box: A practical guide to human-in-the-loop distillation",
    "event": "PyData London",
    "location": "London (United Kingdom)",
    "url": "https://pydata.org/london2024",
    "slides": "https://speakerdeck.com/inesmontani/taking-llms-out-of-the-black-box-a-practical-guide-to-human-in-the-loop-distillation",
    "video": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgLLgvjZ_FA",
    "notes": "https://explosion.ai/blog/human-in-the-loop-distillation"
}

Thanks for following along with this series and all the great feedback 🖤 Let me know if there are any other topics you’d like me to cover and I’ll keep adding to this series in the future. And of course, if you’ve created your own slides using some of my posts for inspiration, feel free to email me – I’d love to check them out!