LinkedIn is a popular social media platform used by professionals and businesses to network, share content, and find jobs. One helpful feature on LinkedIn is the ability to use bullet points in the various sections of your profile, as well as in posts and articles.
Bullet points allow you to break up large blocks of text, highlight important points, and make your content more visually appealing. But how exactly do you add bullet points on LinkedIn?
Using Bullet Points in Your LinkedIn Profile Sections
You can use bullet points in several sections of your LinkedIn profile, including the Summary, Experience, Education, Skills, Accomplishments, and Additional Information sections. Here are some tips for using bullet points in these sections:
- Summary – Use bullet points to highlight your top skills, experience, and achievements. You want to catch the reader’s attention with concise, punchy bullet points in your summary.
- Experience – Use bullet points to describe your responsibilities and achievements in each position listed. Bullets help organize the information neatly.
- Education – Bullet list degrees, certifications, relevant coursework, awards, study abroad programs, and other details you want to feature.
- Skills – LinkedIn automatically formats the skills section as a list. Simply add your most relevant skills.
- Accomplishments – List accomplishments like publications, patents, courses taught, conferences spoken at, volunteer work, and languages.
- Additional Information – Use bulleted lists for interests, associations, honors, test scores, and other details.
To add bullets in these sections, place each bullet point on its own line and add a dash (-) or asterisk (*) at the beginning of the line before the text. This will auto-format into a bulleted list.
Using Bullet Points in LinkedIn Posts
You can also use bullet points to format text in LinkedIn posts, which include article posts, image posts, video posts, and document posts. Using bulleted lists is an effective way to organize information and make long blocks of text more readable.
To add bullet points in your LinkedIn posts:
- When writing your post, press Enter to create a new line for each bullet point.
- Add an asterisk (*) or dash (-) followed by a space at the start of each line you want to be a bullet point.
- The line will automatically convert to a bulleted line when you post.
An example bullet point list in a LinkedIn post would look like this:
- First bullet point example
- Second bullet point follows
- Use bulleted lists for easy reading
Formatting Bullet Points in LinkedIn Articles
The LinkedIn Articles feature allows you to publish long-form articles just like blog posts. You can use bullet points in your LinkedIn articles to break up sections and draw attention to key information.
To create bulleted or numbered lists in LinkedIn articles, use the following HTML formatting:
- Unordered list – <ul> and </ul> tags to start/end the list, and <li> and </li> tags for each list item.
- Ordered list – <ol> and </ol> tags to start/end the list, and <li> and </li> tags for each list item.
For example:
<ul> <li>First bullet point</li> <li>Second bullet point</li> <li>etc...</li> </ul> <ol> <li>First point</li> <li>Second point</li> <li>etc...</li> </ol>
This HTML formatting allows you to create clean, professionally formatted bulleted and numbered lists within your LinkedIn articles.
Tips for Using Bullet Points Effectively
Now that you know how to make bullet points on LinkedIn, here are some tips for using them most effectively:
- Be concise – Bullet points should contain short phrases or sentence fragments, not long blocks of text.
- Be consistent – Use the same structure and formatting for all bullet points in a given section.
- Use spacing – Leave a line of space before and after bulleted lists to separate them from surrounding text.
- Highlight important information – Use bullets to draw attention to key points.
- Break up text – Insert bulleted lists periodically to divide long sections of text.
- Use numbered lists – When listing steps in a process or chronological points, use numbered lists.
- Keep it simple – Only use basic bulleted and numbered HTML tags. Avoid complex nesting or styling.
Why Use Bullet Points on LinkedIn?
Adding bullet points in your LinkedIn profile and posts provides several benefits:
- Improves readability – Bullet points format text into easy-to-read units rather than long paragraphs.
- Quickly highlights key points – Readers can skim bulleted lists to grasp the main takeaways.
- Better organization – Grouping related information into bulleted lists keeps your content neat and organized.
- Holds attention – Breaking up text into lists helps maintain the reader’s attention.
- Visually appealing – The spacing and indenting of bullets makes content less dense and more appealing.
- Easier to update – You can easily add or remove individual bullets as needed when updating content.
In short, using bullet points strategically on LinkedIn improves the presentation and clarity of your content. Lists help readers comprehend and retain information.
Conclusion
Adding bullet points on LinkedIn is easy – simply use dashes or asterisks for unordered lists, and HTML list tags for ordered lists. Use bullet points sparingly to highlight key information. Effective use of bulleted lists will make your LinkedIn profile and posts more engaging, professional, and easy to read. Leverage the power of bullet points to showcase your best assets to your network.