Bold text for LinkedIn
posts, headlines and comments

LinkedIn stores posts, headlines and comments as plain text. There is no markup layer, so there is nothing for a bold button to set, and typing markdown asterisks leaves the asterisks visible.

The workaround is to change the letters instead of formatting them. Unicode contains a block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, added so that a bold variable and an italic variable could be told apart in an equation. It happens to contain a complete bold alphabet, a complete italic alphabet, and several more besides.

Because those are ordinary characters, LinkedIn accepts them exactly as it accepts a letter or a full stop. Nothing is being tricked, and nothing will break.

The steps are the same on a phone, because the styling travels in the text rather than in the app. Open this page in your mobile browser, write or paste the text, highlight the words to emphasise, tap a style, then tap Copy.

Switch to the LinkedIn app, start your post, and paste. Long press in the composer and choose Paste, or use the paste button your keyboard offers.

The browser extensions that add a formatting toolbar inside LinkedIn only work on desktop Chrome, which is why a page like this is usually the simpler route on a phone.

This is the part worth knowing before you style a headline. LinkedIn search matches ordinary letters. A bold capital B is a different character from a plain capital B, so a recruiter searching for your job title will not match it if you have styled it.

Keep the words you want to be found for in plain text. Style the words that are there to catch the eye.

The same distinction matters for accessibility. A screen reader reading a bold character may announce it by its Unicode name, spell the word out letter by letter, or pass over it in silence. None of those are what you intended, and the reader has no way to tell that a styled word was meant to be emphasis.

The characters work anywhere that accepts plain text, which covers LinkedIn posts, headlines, About sections, comments and messages, along with Instagram bios and captions, X, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram and most forums.

They break where a font is missing. A device renders a character only if one of its fonts contains it, and the less common blocks are missing from older Android system fonts, where they appear as empty boxes. Bold, italic and monospace are the most widely supported. Script, gothic and squared are the most likely to fail.

A post where every line is bold reads as a post with no emphasis at all, and it is the quickest way to make writing look like spam.

The pattern that works is one styled element per post: the opening line, a single statistic, or the headings in a longer piece. Everything else stays plain.

The first 210 characters or so are all the feed shows before it adds see more, and that number shrinks on narrow screens. If you are going to style one thing, style something that falls above the cut.

LinkedIn has no list button either, so bullets are made the same way: paste a bullet character at the start of the line. The buttons under the editor insert the common ones.

Line breaks are kept as you type them, including blank lines between paragraphs, which is the simplest way to make a long post readable. One caveat is that pasting from a word processor sometimes brings invisible characters with it, and those can collapse your spacing. Pasting through this box, or any plain text field, strips them out.