So you may have seen so many marketers trying to stand out and using bold, italic and all sorts of “different” fonts.

Hey, I totally get it, we are dealing with a gazillion of posts in our newsfeed every single minute, so HOW do you grab attention? How do you get them to stop their “zombie” scroll and read your post?

Well after you finish reading this one you will never use those font generators because…. THEY ARE LOSING YOU LEADS, CLIENTS & MONEY!

Formatting Options On Facebook

Facebook released some formatting options in the recent times.
BUT those options are only available:

1. Inside Facebook groups.
2. Only for those posts that are created on a desktop version.

Our profiles and business pages were never allowed to format our posts. I do not know why and what is the reasoning behind it, to be honest, and it makes very little sense to me that this feature did not spread to all Facebook places. They could at least allow those on a desktop version.

I only assume that it has to do with how different devices encode the information we see on our screens.

You see, we are forgetting that EVERYTHING we see online is NOT WHAT WE SEE at all!

What Is Really Happening?

Yes, it is a version of “the Matrix” and if you are not very techie, you should still keep in mind that there are no words and pictures on your phone or computer screen. There is only super complicated strings of code.

So every device that connects to, say Facebook, has a mission to encode this information and present it to you in beautiful words and pictures.

And this is where formatting sometimes can get complicated.
I am not going to go in-depth (because there is no need for it for our lesson today), but the bottom line is this:

1. If you use something that Facebook itself does not offer, it may appear broken on some devices, particularly older models.
2. There are hundreds of models of devices that are unable to perform this “translation” so all people see is a bunch of weird squares or odd characters.

Like this:

So if you used one of those fancy font generators for your headline or call to action and then pasted it into your Facebook post status – it is guaranteed that part of your audience sees those most important lines in your posts all scrambled up.

Even though your own phone might show it as intended.

The saddest part of any online technology is that it need to be tested on many many devices to ensure all is tickety-boo!

Because when it is not – YOU MIGHT HAVE JUST LOST YOUR NEXT BIG CLIENT!

And what makes me even more sad, is to see ads on Facebook, often made up entirely from text generated elsewhere and appearing as lines of squares to me.

Someone is actually paying for showing these posts to their audience!!!

I even saw a Tony Robbins event in Dublin being advertised (and completely messed up) last year…

This is why I am writing this article today. Not to shame you for using the fancy fonts, I know you were just trying to stand out (and I encourage that).

I just want to warn you that not everything “different” works, so do not jump on any new shiny object promising you unicorns. You may find out it is not all rosey after all.

Instead, why not trying to use a combination of ALL CAPS (not too much – or it comes across as you are shouting) and emojis ???  as pattern interrupt in your next post?

Have a look again how I did it in the same Facebook post: