11 Ideas For The “About” Section Of Your LinkedIn™ Profile

A lot of LinkedIn™ users aren’t sure what to do with their About section, so they don’t even bother with it, leaving it blank, and that is a big missed opportunity. 

Your About section, particularly with the phasing in of LinkedIn™’s AI, is the section  that ties everything together in your profile. 

Three aspects of the About section make it different from other sections in your profile: 

• As your About section doesn’t have an explicit role like other sections such as Experience, Skills or Education do, it can be more open ended. Because of this, you can use it to tie together the other parts of your profile into one narrative. And LinkedIn™’s AI can “understand” this narrative.
• You can add the “why” aspect to the “what” and “how” of your career that you outline elsewhere in your Experience sections. This is a great place to talk about why you wound up taking the career path that you did. 
• This section is a terrific place to add a call to action for your ideal profile reader.  

Here are a eleven ideas based on what I have learned (often the hard way) with respect to the About section:

1) The first two or three lines are your hook. If a profile visitor is intrigued by your first few lines, they read the rest of your About section. So don’t look generic, be the individual that you are. 

2) Think of your About section as an opportunity to describe how you add value. In this section you are effectively talking directly to your ideal reader. 

3) Be careful with your focus – it is easy to fall into this being all about you, when in fact it is all about what you could and can do for the reader. Often this is just a case of the frame or reference you use. An example I often cite is the sales rep who is the number one sales rep for his company. But his or her ideal reader is a prospective customer, who really doesn’t care how much the rep sold, but is more interested in other metrics. So if that same sales rep instead of saying how much they sold, talked about their unusually high customer retention rate, has now couched pretty much the same statement – this is a top sales rep – but done so in a manner that is ideal-reader focused. 

4) In your Experience sections you talk about what you do and what you have accomplished. In your About section you can add which aspects you enjoy most and which aspects you take the most pride in. You can explicitly say what challenges you enjoy. 

5) Your ideal profile visitor has problems. Because of the narrative style of this section, you have an opportunity to really show that you understand those problems, and have helped others solve them. 

6) This section is  a place where you can place more emphasis on aspects of your job or skills that you have that you feel you couldn’t get across strongly enough in your Experience or other sections of your profile. 

7) This is also a place to infer or just say what it is like to work with you. There is nothing like previewing for your reader what a good experience it is to work with you.

8) The About section is a place you can put a call to action, along with your contact details. Don’t just ask people to connect. That puts one more step and more time between you and them. Make it your phone number, your email, or that they can send you a free message if you are Open Profile. 

9) I don’t think there is any one way you have to write your About section. I think it depends on what your profile “needs” after you have completed the other sections.  For this reason I suggest that you write this section after you have completed your experience and skills sections. 

10) This is the one section where you can talk in a more conversational tone. A good About section can make the difference between a dry set of skills and accomplishments and letting your personality come out. 

11) You have 2600 characters to work with. Use them!