How Do I Bold, Italicize and Format Text on My LinkedIn Profile?

   I often get questions from people regarding LinkedIn. When I feel the question is shared by others, I post it here on my blog for all to read.

Question:

Hello Donna,

I have been doing some revisions to my LinkedIn profile and I appreciate some of the insights and “tricks” I learned from your website. Thank you so much.

I have one question, that I hope you won’t mind providing me an answer: How can I get certain text in my LinkedIn profile to be bold, italicized, etc.? If you can share that trick with me, I would be truly grateful.

Thank you again for the assistance I have already received from your website and blog. Take care.

Regards,

David

Answer:

Hi David!

Unfortunately, you cannot bold, italicize or format text NATIVELY on your LinkedIn profile.

What I mean by that is LinkedIn doesn’t provide format options like bold or italicize buttons. All you have is an input field where you enter plain text.

Recently, sites have appeared that provide the ability to generate “fancy text” that can be copied and pasted into your LinkedIn profile. This “fancy text” looks like formatted text or even different font faces. The way it works is you enter the text you want formatted and these generators will convert the text from plain text to bold, italics, underline, and more.

Try out our LinkedIn Text Formatter:

LinkedIn Text Formatter

Before you go crazy pasting formatted text into your LinkedIn profile, I must warn you — this is not a magical conversion of text. What these converters are doing isn’t actually formatting text. Instead they are taking the over 100,000 text symbols available within the unicode library and remapping it to our alphabet.

These characters were added to Unicode primarily for mathematicians to write equations.

In order to add visual appeal, you can add symbols or bullets to your profile. Adding symbols is a great way to enhance your LinkedIn profile and make it stand out from other profiles.

Adding Bullets & Symbols to Your LinkedIn Profile

To add symbols to your LinkedIn profile, all you do is copy and paste them.

1. Highlight the symbol you want to use. You can see a list of symbols on my LinkedIn profile.

2. Once the symbol is highlighted, COPY it. You can copy it by clicking Ctrl-C or right mouse clicking on the highlighted symbol and choosing COPY from the right mouse menu. If you use a Mac, you can click Apple+C.

Your symbol is now copied and ready to be pasted.

3. Within LinkedIn, click Profile > Edit Profile. Place your cursor where you want the bullet placed.

4. Paste the bullet by clicking Ctrl-V or right mouse clicking and choosing PASTE from the right mouse menu. If you use a Mac, you can click Apple+V.

Visually Enhance Your LinkedIn Profile

It’s important to add visual appeal to your LinkedIn profile but I must caution you to use these symbols SPARINGLY! Too many different types of symbols will make your profile look busy and unprofessional. My suggestions is to use 1 or 2 symbols for your LinkedIn profile. LESS IS MORE.

Format Your LinkedIn Profile with Symbols & Bullets

Here are the most used symbols on LinkedIn:

★ ♦ ✔ ■ ● ✉ ✆

Instead of bolding text, you can use a symbol to set off the word or sentence.

Example:

⇨ Key Accomplishments

To achieve italics, you can add a symbol before and after the sentence.

Example:

★ I am open to relocating ★

Perhaps one day LinkedIn will allow us to truly format text on LinkedIn profiles but until then, we can use symbols and bullets to achieve that visual appeal.

–Donna