Unicode formatting on LinkedIn: bold, italic, and when to use them

If you have ever seen a LinkedIn post with bold text or italic text and wondered how they did it, the answer is not what you might expect. LinkedIn does not support rich text formatting in posts. There is no toolbar, no markdown, no hidden menu. What you are actually seeing is Unicode.

I want to walk you through how it works, when it makes sense to use it, and where people get into trouble.

What Unicode formatting actually is

Unicode is a character encoding standard that includes thousands of symbols. Among those symbols are entire alphabets that look like bold, italic, or script versions of the regular Latin letters. When someone types "𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼" in a LinkedIn post, they are not applying a font style. They are using completely different characters that happen to look bold.

Think of it like this: the letter "A" and the character "𝗔" are two separate entries in the Unicode table. Your browser renders them differently because they are, technically, different characters. This is why you can paste them into a plain text field like LinkedIn and they keep their appearance.

Tools like our LinkedIn Content Studio convert your regular text into these special Unicode characters. You type normally, pick the style you want, and the tool swaps in the Unicode equivalents.

When bold and italic actually help

Used sparingly, Unicode formatting can genuinely improve your posts. Here are the situations where I think it works well:

Highlighting a key takeaway. If your post builds toward one central insight, making that sentence bold helps the skimmers catch it. Most people scroll fast. One bold line can stop them.

Section headers in longer posts. If you are writing something that runs 200+ words, a bold word or phrase at the start of each section helps people navigate. It is like giving your post structure without needing bullet points.

Emphasizing a single word. Italic works beautifully for emphasis on one word in a sentence. "I did not say it was easy. I said it was worth it." That kind of thing. Subtle, but it changes how the sentence reads.

The mistakes I see most often

The biggest problem with Unicode formatting is overuse. I have seen posts where every other sentence is bold. When everything is emphasized, nothing is. Your reader's eye has nowhere to rest, and the post starts to feel like it is shouting.

Another common mistake is using script or fancy fonts for entire paragraphs. You know the ones. They look decorative and are almost impossible to read. If someone has to squint to parse your words, they will just keep scrolling.

I have also seen people mix bold, italic, underline, and script in the same post. It ends up looking like a ransom note. Pick one style for emphasis and stick with it.

The accessibility problem nobody talks about

Here is something important that most formatting guides skip: screen readers struggle with Unicode formatted text. When a visually impaired person uses a screen reader to consume your post, the software may read each Unicode bold character individually, or skip it entirely, or pronounce it as the Unicode character name.

That means your carefully bolded sentence might come through as gibberish. Or silence. Neither is great.

This does not mean you should never use Unicode formatting. But it does mean you should use it with intention. If your key point only exists in a bolded line and a screen reader cannot parse it, you have excluded part of your audience.

My suggestion: write your post so it works perfectly as plain text first. Then add formatting as a visual enhancement, not as a structural requirement. If you removed all the bold and italic, the post should still make complete sense.

A practical approach

Here is the rule of thumb I follow. In a post of around 150 to 200 words, I will bold at most one or two phrases. Maybe use italic once for emphasis. That is it. The formatting should serve the writing, not replace it.

If you find yourself reaching for bold because a sentence feels flat, the problem is probably the sentence, not the formatting. Rewrite it instead.

And if you are using a tool to format your text (which I recommend over manually copying Unicode characters from random websites), make sure it gives you a preview. You want to see exactly what your audience will see before you hit post.