What to write in your LinkedIn About section

Write your LinkedIn About section so the first two or three lines name the situation your reader is in, using words they would use themselves. Those lines are the section for almost everyone who lands on your profile, because LinkedIn hides the rest behind a “see more” link that most visitors never tap. After the preview, the order that works is: what you do about that situation, two or three pieces of proof, one line about who you are not for, and one instruction. Nothing about your years of experience goes anywhere near the top. That opening is the single most common failure in the field, and it is a failure of sequence rather than of writing.

How long is the LinkedIn About section, really?

Every page answering this says 2,600 characters. We went looking for the source and there is not one. LinkedIn's help article on editing the About section on your profile explains where to click and states no character count at all. The 2,600 figure comes from third parties who counted, including AuthoredUp and LinkedHelper. It is very likely correct. It is not documented, and it can change without an announcement.

The more useful number is the one nobody puts in a headline: how much shows before the cut.

Two consequences follow, and they are the whole strategy. First, write the preview as a standalone unit: it has to make sense and create a reason to expand. Second, do not put anything load-bearing after character 250 that a stranger needs in order to understand you. Your call to action, your credentials, and your best story all sit behind a click that most people will not make.

Is it true a complete About section gets 3.9x more profile views?

We cannot find any evidence that LinkedIn ever said this. The claim appears on dozens of profile-optimisation pages, usually phrased as “according to LinkedIn” or “LinkedIn's own data”, and none of them link to a LinkedIn page. We searched for one and came up empty. Until someone produces the primary source, treat 3.9x as untraceable and do not repeat it.

This is worth dwelling on, because the field is full of numbers with the same shape. Compare it with a statistic that does hold up. LinkedIn's own blog, in a post dated March 2017, states that “simply having a profile photo results in up to 21x more profile views and 9x more connection requests”. That one is real, it is on a LinkedIn domain, and it was repeated on LinkedIn's business blog in a December 2018 round-up. It is also nine years old and describes a product that has changed a great deal since, which is worth saying out loud whenever anyone quotes it, including us.

The honest position on the About section is this: filling it in is obviously better than leaving it blank, LinkedIn search matches against its text, and nobody has published a credible measurement of how much a good one is worth. Our own dataset is post-level, not profile-level, so we cannot fill that gap either. Anyone who tells you a specific multiplier is quoting a number with no source behind it. The same caution applies to the numbers in any profile optimization guide, including ours.

What should the first three lines of your About section say?

Name the reader's situation. Not your background, not your mission, not the year you entered the industry. The reader arrived from a post or a search result and is deciding in about four seconds whether you are relevant to them, and the fastest way to answer that is to describe them.

Four openers that work, with invented examples:

• The situation.“Most finance teams I meet close the month in eight days and spend three of them arguing about which number is right.” The reader recognises themselves before they know anything about you.
• The blunt statement of what you do.“I get mid-size factories from 60% to 90% on-time delivery. Usually in one quarter, usually without new software.” Works when the outcome is concrete enough to be interesting on its own.
• The specific credential, stated plainly.“I have run post-merger integration on fourteen deals, all industrials, none of them tidy.” Works if the number is genuinely unusual in your field.
• The position.“I think most B2B companies are underpriced and I can usually prove it in the first two weeks.” A claim someone could disagree with, which is what makes it readable.

Three openers that fail, and they are the three most common ones in the field:

• “With over fifteen years of experience across...” A sentence about you, delivered to someone who does not yet care about you. It also spends the entire preview on a fact that is visible in your Experience section anyway.
• “I am a passionate, results-driven professional...” Every word is unfalsifiable and therefore invisible.
• “As a child, I was always fascinated by...” The origin story can be excellent, and it belongs in paragraph three, after the reader has decided to expand.

A practical constraint that helps: write the first 250 characters, paste them somewhere on their own, and read them cold. If they read as an introduction rather than as a fragment, you have the preview right.

What structure should the rest of the About section follow?

Five blocks, in this order, with rough word budgets. Total between 150 and 350 words for most people.

Block four is worth defending because people flinch at it. One sentence saying who you do not serve costs you nothing, because those people were not going to hire you, and it raises the credibility of every claim above it. “I do not work with pre-revenue companies and I am not the right person for a turnaround” makes the rest of the section read as a considered position rather than a pitch.

Block five fails more often than any other. A call to action that says “feel free to reach out” is not an instruction. “Message me the word audit and I will send the pricing checklist” is. One action, phrased so the reader knows they did it correctly. The equivalent problem on the posting side is covered in how to write a LinkedIn post CTA.

Should you write in first person or third person?

First person. The third-person About (“Sarah is a marketing leader who...”) is a conference biography, and it reads as one. It also clashes with your posts, which are written in first person by necessity, and the mismatch is noticeable to anyone who arrived from your content.

Our post data points the same direction, with the caveat that it describes posts rather than profiles. Across 12,988 posts from 65 creators, first-person openers appear in 19.6% of top-decile posts against 10.1% of the bottom half. That is a correlation among established accounts and not a controlled test, and we have no profile-level equivalent. But there is no reason to think a reader who prefers a human voice in the feed wants a press release on the profile.

The one legitimate exception: a genuinely public figure whose biography is written by someone else and reused in press materials and event programmes. If you are copying a bio that already exists in five places, third person is consistent. Everyone else should write as themselves.

How do you get keywords in without wrecking it?

The About section is one of the fields LinkedIn search matches against, so the words a buyer or recruiter would type need to be present. The wrong way to do it is the keyword block: a comma-separated list of terms at the bottom of the section, sometimes labelled “Specialties”.

LinkedIn addresses this directly on its page about relevance in people search, which advises including keywords that accurately reflect your expertise and experience, and notes that keyword stuffing may look like spam to its systems. The same page is candid that there is no single correct result order, and that relevance depends partly on the searcher: their activity, their past searches, and patterns from other members who ran similar queries.

The approach that works in three steps:

1. Write down the three phrases someone would actually type to find you. Real phrases, as a non-specialist would type them.
2. Put the most important one in your headline, in the first 60 characters. The mechanics of that are in our headline examples guide.
3. Put all three into your About section inside real sentences, spread apart rather than clustered. If a sentence would not survive being read aloud, it is stuffing.

What should your About section say in each situation?

The structure is constant, the emphasis moves. Five short blueprints.

• Job seeker. Preview: role, level, and what you are looking for. Proof: two specific things you did with numbers attached. Instruction: what a recruiter should message you about. Skip the who-you-are-not-for block; it does not apply.
• Career switcher. Preview: the new role, with the old career reframed as domain knowledge rather than a gap. Proof: the transferable evidence, plus anything you have shipped in the new field, however small. Instruction: what kind of conversation you want.
• Consultant or coach.Preview: the client's situation. Proof: client shape, engagement length, one metric. Who you are not for: essential here, since your inbound is unfiltered. Instruction: how to start a conversation and what to expect from it. More on the positioning in headline examples for consultants.
• In-house leader. Preview: what your team owns and what problem it solves. Proof: scale, scope, one thing you changed. Instruction: usually hiring, which is the most valuable use of the field for anyone running a team.
• Founder. A different problem entirely, because four audiences read it with conflicting needs. That case is in the LinkedIn About section for founders.

Does formatting help, or does it get in the way?

Line breaks help. Almost everything else is decoration that costs you preview space.

The reason line breaks matter is the same reason they matter in posts. A wall of text on a phone screen reads as work, and a reader deciding whether you are relevant in four seconds will not do work. Two-sentence paragraphs with blank lines between them are scannable, and scannable is the entire requirement. The equivalent argument for the feed is in how to format a LinkedIn post, and it applies to the profile without modification.

Where formatting goes wrong:

• Bullet lists of services. Six check marks in a row turns your profile into a brochure, and brochures get skimmed by default.
• Headers in capitals. WHAT I DO / WHO I HELP / HOW TO REACH ME turns a 250-word section into a form. If the structure needs labels, the structure is wrong.
• A wall of emoji. One or two as markers is fine. A column of them down the left edge reads as an advert.
• Blank lines inside the preview. Line breaks consume preview space. In the first 250 characters, keep it tight and start the whitespace after the fold.

A related point about the special characters people use for bold text on LinkedIn. Those are Unicode substitutions rather than real formatting, and screen readers handle them badly. On a profile that a recruiter may read with assistive technology, that is a real cost for a small visual gain.

Where should the call to action and the links go?

The instruction goes at the end of the About section. The link goes in Featured.

Featured is the part of the profile built for this: it renders items with a thumbnail and a title, which means a link there gets read as an object rather than as a string of characters. Three or four items is the ceiling, and the useful set is usually your best-performing post, one piece of proof, and the single thing you want people to do. The field-by-field detail sits in our profile optimization guide.

That leaves the About section to carry the instruction rather than the destination. “The pricing checklist is in my Featured section” is a better closing line than a pasted URL, because it points at something the reader can see on the same screen. If you want a message instead of a click, ask for a specific one: a keyword to send makes the request unambiguous and gives you a clean way to sort your inbox.

One thing to avoid: three calls to action stacked at the end. Book a call, subscribe to the newsletter, download the guide. Each one halves the chance of the others happening, and the reader resolves the choice by making none of them.

What should you cut from your About section?

• The list of skills in prose. You have a Skills section. Repeating it in sentences helps nobody and costs you the preview.
• Your full career chronology. That is what Experience is for. The About section is an argument, not a timeline.
• Quotes from famous people. They tell the reader about the person you quoted.
• Emoji bullet lists of services. Six lines each starting with a check mark reads as a brochure, and brochure formatting cues readers to skim.
• Anything about being passionate, driven, or dynamic. If a competitor could paste the sentence into their own profile without editing it, delete it.
• Three different calls to action. Pick the one you actually want.

How do you know if anyone reads your About section?

LinkedIn gives you more instrumentation here than most people realise. Its help page on viewing your profile Search Appearances describes profile engagement data including total impressions, total clicks, average viewing time, and impressions per section, plus filters for where you appeared, the top companies your searchers worked at, the top job titles of your searchers, and the job titles you were found for.

Impressions per section is the closest thing to a direct measurement of whether your About section is being seen, and average viewing time is a rough proxy for whether people stay. Neither is a controlled experiment, and both move with your posting volume rather than your edits, so read them as trend lines over a month rather than as a scoreboard.

The diagnostic that actually matters is a ratio you count by hand. Rising profile views with flat inbound messages means the content is working and the profile is leaking. Steady views with reasonable inbound means the profile is fine and you are not publishing enough, which is a content strategy problem rather than a writing problem.

How does the About section connect to your posts?

It is the second thing someone reads after deciding your post was worth their time. That is the whole mechanism: a post earns the profile click, the headline confirms who you are, and the top of the About section decides whether the visitor follows, connects, messages, or leaves.

Which means the About section should sound like your posts. If your writing in the feed is direct and specific and your About section is corporate, the visitor experiences a mismatch and resolves it by trusting neither. The easiest way to fix this is to write the About section immediately after writing a post you were happy with, while the voice is still in your head.

We can measure the first half of that path and not the second. Our dataset covers 12,988 posts and says nothing about profiles. What it does say about the visible part of a post is in our study of 34,012 LinkedIn posts, and the first-line mechanics are in writing LinkedIn hooks. The About preview is the same skill applied to a different field: get the meaning into the part that shows.

How do you rewrite your About section in twenty minutes?

1. Minutes 0-3. Write down who the reader is. One person, not a market.
2. Minutes 3-8.Write the preview: two sentences naming that person's situation. Do not mention yourself.
3. Minutes 8-12. Write what you do about it, in the plainest words you have.
4. Minutes 12-16. Add two or three pieces of proof. Numbers if you have them, named outcomes if you do not.
5. Minutes 16-18. Add one line about who you are not for, and one instruction.
6. Minutes 18-20.Open your profile on your phone and look at what shows before “see more”. Cut until the preview stands alone.

Then leave it for a quarter. Profile editing is a comfortable way to avoid publishing, and publishing is what sends people to the profile in the first place. The rest of the fields, including Featured, skills, and the banner, are covered field by field in LinkedIn profile optimization.

What to write in your LinkedIn About section comes down to sequence. Reader's situation first, in the 250 characters that show. What you do second. Proof third. One honest exclusion, one clear instruction, and nothing about your years of experience anywhere near the top.