Are you tired of feeling like your social media posts are falling flat? Despite your best efforts, are your engagement rates plummeting and your reach dwindling? You’re not alone! Many social media managers and marketers are struggling to get their content seen, and it may come down to one surprising culprit: text formatting on schedulers.
In this post, we’ll dive into the world of social media scheduling and explore how the way you format your text might be killing your social reach. From character limits to formatting faux pas, we’ll uncover the secrets to maximizing your online presence and getting your content seen by the right people.
You’ve probably seen it in Publer, Buffer, and other social scheduling tools: the option to bold, italicize, or otherwise style your text with just a click. It feels like a fun way to add emphasis, but behind the scenes, it’s doing something you really don’t want.
When you hit bold in these tools, they don’t actually send out text wrapped in a standard HTML <strong> tag. Instead, they convert your regular words into special Unicode characters. These characters look like bold text, but they’re not actually text.
They’re decorative symbols. And that comes with a few serious problems.
- Screen readers can’t read them.
- Search functions won’t find them.
- Translation tools can’t process them.
- Assistive tech users are locked out.
That means anyone who doesn’t visually read your content is excluded from engaging with it. It also means your SEO, discoverability, and even reach can take a hit because algorithms can’t interpret it either.
Let’s be blunt: if you want your posts to be invisible, by all means, keep using those fake bold characters.
But if you care about real accessibility, real reach, and real human interaction, stop formatting this way.
Instead:
- Use standard punctuation and spacing to emphasize.
- Keep your formatting accessible and semantically correct.
- If you need bold, use it in the original platform where real HTML is supported.
This tiny change makes a huge difference in reach and readability, and it aligns your marketing with actual accessibility best practices.
Need help untangling which tools are truly accessible? That’s what I do. Easy A11y Guide is here to help agencies and businesses implement real, usable accessibility strategies without sacrificing results.
Let’s make your content more inclusive and more effective, starting with ditching the fake bold.
Transcript
Have you been using social schedulers and hitting the bold in them?
Tools like Publer and other social scheduling tools allow you to bold text when you go to post it. Unfortunately, the way they handle this is they don’t send a bold tag. No, they take your text and they convert it from normal characters in a normal human language into these very special Unicode characters.
For example, I have a post up here and it’s got a checkmark. Well, that checkmark is a special rendered character. And you’ll notice that this text, TikTok gets another extension, doesn’t look like the other text on the page because this isn’t actually words. These are very special characters that are rendered.
What that means is anyone using assistive technology can’t read this text. Anyone trying to use a search command can’t read this text. Anyone trying to translate it between different languages can’t read this text because it’s not actually text.
It’s special characters, and because it’s special characters, it can’t be read or interpreted by anyone outside of someone who can visually see it and read it.
So if you don’t like getting reach for your posts, if you don’t want to show up in searches, if you don’t want real people to be able to interact with your content, go ahead and keep using the bold and other formatting features in tools like Publer and Buffer and others.
But if you want to reach real people, stop using those tools immediately because they aren’t rendering real text that can be read by real people or real machines.