Copy bullet point symbols for tidy lists

A bio, caption or comment is plain text. There is no bullet button and no indent, so whatever marks the start of a line has to be a character you type or paste. What Instagram does keep is the line break, and that is all a list really needs: one item per line, with the same bullet in front of each. Spaces at the start of a line and blank lines between items are less dependable, because Instagram often collapses them, so you can’t indent a sub-point the way you would in a document.

Two characters do most of the work. • (bullet, U+2022) is the round dot familiar from word processors. · (middle dot, U+00B7) is smaller and sits between words rather than in front of a line, as in “baker · teacher · dog person”. Both have been in common character sets since the 1980s, so they show correctly on any phone.

Most bullets take the colour and size of your text. A few are also on the emoji list, and some apps switch them to emoji without asking, so a neat column of ▪ can arrive on another phone as a column of emoji squares. The last column below says which is which.

Tip: If a bullet must look the same on every phone, choose one with “No” in the last column. That is why ► and ▸ are in the copy grid and ▶ is not.

Numbers suit steps, rankings and day-by-day plans. Each numbered style stops at a different point, so check the limit before you start a list of twelve.

Beyond twenty, ordinary digits followed by a full stop or a bracket, like 21. or 21), are clearer than any symbol, and a screen reader reads them as plain numbers.

• Use one bullet for the whole list. A list that starts with • and switches to ▪ halfway looks like two lists.
• Mark second-level points with a lighter shape. Since leading spaces may vanish, a ◦ or ‣ line under a • line does the job an indent would.
• Keep items short. In a bio every bullet and the space after it come out of the 150-character limit, so three tight lines beat five long ones.
• Leave a space after the bullet. “•cakes” looks cramped; “• cakes” reads as a list.
• Put the most important item first. The feed shows only the start of a caption, with the rest hidden behind “more”.

Tip: Screen readers say the name of every bullet. Hearing “bullet” before each line is fine; hearing “small blue diamond” six times is tiring. For long lists, text bullets are the kinder choice.