I’ll confess up front, I’m writing this post somewhat against my better judgment. In the spirit of trying to share information about “all things LinkedIn” via my blog, however, I figured I should at least mention a nifty little tool that many people haven’t discovered — and that allows LinkedIn users to jazz up their profiles with some innovative text formatting options in the hopes of standing out from the crowd.
Just to share a little background, LinkedIn is unusual (as most of you know) in being a site that allows almost NO formatting options for the text one adds to their profile. Personally, I think this was a brilliant choice by the founders, since it helps level the playing field and avoids having a billion different users on there go crazy with creative formatting at the expense of the actual data/content itself. So I personally am glad the site hasn’t allowed people to apply bold text, underlining, italics, bulleted lists, and that sort of thing over the years — as standard as these choices might be in the general computing world today.
And yet, if you’re truly determined to get fancy, the link below will take you to a free tool where you can type any text and apply 20+ different formatting effects to it — and then paste the resulting text into your LinkedIn profile where, lo and behold, the formatting suddenly appears!
https://typegrow.com/tools/linkedin-text-formatter
While this trick isn’t all that new, and there have been many articles written over the years explaining how people can bypass the basic formatting restrictions on LinkedIn, the tool above is the most user-friendly one I’ve ever come across. And you can tell it’s still not something most people have ever discovered, given the fact that less than 1% of all LinkedIn profiles showcase any of the text effects in question. I even still do a double-take, myself, whenever I come across a LinkedIn page utilizing this kind of special formatting — it’s just that uncommon.
So it’s kind of a cool parlor trick, I suppose, but here are my words of warning — and why I harbor a bit of reluctance in sharing this tip. Just because you CAN format your LinkedIn content in various ways doesn’t mean you SHOULD do so. The vast majority of the text effects enabled by the above tool are just really, really cheesy. They look silly, outdated, and (to quote Tim Walz) just downright weird. So outside of perhaps a little bit of bold/underline/italicized text or potential use of the bulleted list option (although this can easily be duplicated by cutting/pasting bullet symbols in from MS Word, too) in spots, I really don’t recommend you use the other alternatives. Sure, doing so might help you stand out from the crowd, but alas, not in a good way!
Enjoy, and again, please excise restraint… :)
