What to put in your LinkedIn Featured section

Your LinkedIn Featured section should contain three or four items, each doing a specific job: your best post as proof you can write, one piece of hard evidence you do the work, and the single action you want a visitor to take. That is the whole brief. Featured is the only place on LinkedIn where you can put an outbound link without a post paying a distribution cost for it, which makes it the most commercially useful field on the profile and the one most people fill with decoration. It is also positioned better than it used to be: LinkedIn moved the About section to the top of the profile in March 2024, which pulled everything beneath it, Featured included, further up the page.

What is the LinkedIn Featured section actually for?

It is the part of your profile that answers “and then what?”

Trace the sequence. Someone reads a post of yours. They tap your name. They land on your profile and read your headline and the first few lines of About. If those work, they are now interested and they have no idea what to do about it. Following you is the default, because it is the only obvious button. Featured is where you offer something better than the default.

That framing has consequences. It means Featured items are not a portfolio, an archive, or a highlights reel of your career. They are the two or three next steps you want to make available at the exact moment someone is deciding whether you are worth more of their attention. A visitor who is mildly curious wants a writing sample. A visitor who is seriously interested wants proof and a way to talk to you. A good Featured section serves both in the same four slots.

Nobody optimizes for this. The typical Featured section contains a company website link, a certificate image, and a post from eighteen months ago that did well, arranged in the order they were added. None of those items was chosen for what it does to a visitor.

What should you put in your Featured section?

A structure that works for almost everyone, in slot order, since the first slot gets the most attention.

1. Slot one: your best-performing post. It does two jobs at once. It is social proof, because the engagement count is visible, and it is a writing sample that shows how you think. Pick the one that best represents the work you want more of, not necessarily the one with the highest numbers.
2. Slot two: hard proof. A case study, a named client outcome, a recorded talk, a piece of published work, a product you built. The thing a sceptic would want to see. This is the slot most profiles are missing entirely.
3. Slot three: the action. Exactly one. A booking page, a waitlist, a guide behind an email address, an application form. If you offer three actions you have offered none, because choosing is work and visitors will not do it.
4. Slot four, optional: the recurring thing. A newsletter, a podcast, a community. Only if it is alive. See LinkedIn newsletters versus posts.

What does not earn a slot: your company's homepage, a certificate, a generic “my portfolio” link, a resume PDF unless you are actively job searching, an award announcement, or a post you liked but that does not represent your work. Each of those occupies space that could have held a next step.

LinkedIn Featured section ideas by what you are trying to do

Generic idea lists are why this query is dominated by Pinterest boards. Here is the same material organized by the outcome you want, which is the way you should actually pick.

Pick one from the proof group, one from the writing group, and one from the action group. That is the algorithm. The temptation is to pick four proof items because they feel flattering, and a profile with four proof items and no action is a profile that converts interest into nothing.

Why is Featured the only free place for a link?

Because a link in a post appears to cost you distribution, and a link in Featured does not.

The evidence for the post-level cost is correlational but consistent in our data. Across 12,988 English LinkedIn posts from 65 creators, shared article and link posts make up 32.7% of the bottom half against 22.1% of the top decile. That is an over-index of roughly 1.5x toward the weak end. It is the clearest format-level penalty signal in the corpus after video's advantage in the other direction.

The within-segment cuts sharpen it. Among leadership posts (2,117 posts from 53 authors), article shares run 15.2% in that topic's own top decile (211 posts, 14 authors) against 35.7% in its own bottom half (1,059 posts, 33 authors). Among sales posts (343 posts from 36 authors), 20.6% in its own top decile (34 posts, 10 authors) against 41.3% in its own bottom half (172 posts, 26 authors). Same subject, same authors pool, very different link behaviour at the two ends.

LinkedIn denies operating a link penalty, and the independent studies on this openly contradict each other. We go through that argument properly in whether external links suppress LinkedIn reach. But you do not need to resolve the causality question to act on this. Whatever the mechanism, a link in the Featured section is read by a visitor who is already on your profile and already interested, and it competes with nothing. That is a strictly better place to put it.

How do you write the title and description for a Featured item?

This is the highest-return detail in the whole section and almost nobody does it, because LinkedIn fills the fields in for you and the defaults look finished.

When you add a link, LinkedIn pulls the destination page title and an image. You can edit both. That means the title is a headline you get to write, aimed at a specific reader, not whatever your CMS produced. The difference is large:

• Default: “Home | Northbridge Consulting”. Written for a search engine.
• Edited: “How we cut a Series B company's close from 12 days to 4”. Written for the person reading it.

Three rules for these titles. Make each one a promise or an outcome rather than a category. Keep them short enough to survive the card, which crops aggressively on mobile. And make sure the four titles read as a set rather than four unrelated things, because a visitor scans them together.

The thumbnail matters nearly as much, since it is the largest element on the card. A link with no image pulls a grey placeholder that reads as broken. An uploaded document uses its first page as the thumbnail, which means the first page of a portfolio PDF is doing more work than the other nineteen combined.

What should a founder feature?

Founders have a specific problem: their profile serves customers, candidates, and investors at once, and those three want different things. The resolution is to pick the audience you most need this quarter and let the other two be served by slot one.

A workable default: your best post about the problem you are solving, a product demo or launch, and one action that matches the current priority. If you are hiring, the action is the roles page. If you are selling, it is a booking link or a demo request. If you are raising, the action slot is better spent on proof, because investors do not click booking links.

Our role data suggests the writing sample is the slot to fight over. Among founders and CEOs (5,619 posts from 21 authors), first-person openers run 19.6% in that role's own top decile (561 posts, 17 authors) against 5.2% in its own bottom half (2,810 posts, 12 authors), close to a fourfold difference. Heavy hashtag use of four or more tags runs 13.2% against 39.4% the other way. So the founder post worth featuring tends to be the one where you talk about something you did, in your own voice, without a wall of tags. More in LinkedIn for founders and CEOs.

What should a consultant or coach feature?

The conversion problem here is different. Consultants are usually credible and rarely specific, so the Featured section should trade generality for evidence.

• One case study with a number in the title. Not a testimonial. A testimonial says you were pleasant to work with. A case study says what changed.
• One post that states your actual position on something. The one that would make a wrong-fit client self-select out. This is the item that produces qualified inbound rather than volume.
• One booking link or diagnostic. A short assessment converts better than a calendar for people who are not yet ready to talk.

The role data points at video for this group. Among coaching and consulting accounts (3,958 posts from 14 authors), native video runs 40.0% in that role's own top decile (395 posts, 11 authors) against 10.7% in its own bottom half (1,979 posts, 6 authors), and first-person openers run 36.2% against 11.9%. If you have one video post that performed, that is your slot-one item. Context in LinkedIn for coaches and consultants.

What should a job seeker feature?

The instinct is to feature a resume. That is usually the wrong first item, because a resume is what a recruiter will ask for anyway and it tells them nothing they will not learn from your profile.

Better set:

1. A post about the work. A problem you solved, described concretely. This is the single most differentiating item available to a candidate, because almost no other candidate has one.
2. Evidence of the craft. A portfolio, a repository, a talk, a piece of published analysis. Something a hiring manager can evaluate without scheduling anything.
3. A short availability post. A written post saying what you are looking for, in your own words, gives you far more control than a badge does and it can be removed silently. The trade-offs of the alternative are in whether the Open to Work badge hurts you.
4. The resume, last. As an uploaded document, if you want it there at all.

Featured, About, or the headline: where should a link go?

You have four places to put a link on and around your profile, and they behave completely differently. Choosing wrong is the most common structural mistake here.

Read the cost column. Featured and contact info are free, the post body is not, and the two text fields do not produce clicks at all. That ranking is stable regardless of what you believe about the link penalty question, which is why Featured is the default answer rather than a clever one.

How do you add something to the Featured section?

Two minutes, and the section does not appear on your profile until you add the first item, which is why many profiles lack it entirely rather than by choice.

1. Open your own profile and find the Featured section. If it is not there, use the “Add profile section” control and add Featured from the recommended sections.
2. Choose what you are adding: a post or article you published, an external link, or uploaded media such as a document, image, or PDF.
3. For a link, let LinkedIn pull the preview, then edit the title and description. This is the step everyone skips and the one that matters most.
4. For an upload, check what the thumbnail looks like. Documents use the first page, so a blank or badly designed cover page becomes the card.
5. Reorder. Drag your most important item into the first position rather than accepting the order you happened to add things in.
6. Check it on a phone. The carousel shows fewer cards on mobile and crops titles harder than the desktop preview suggests.

What should an executive feature?

Executives have the opposite problem to job seekers: their credibility is assumed and their specifics are missing. The profile says the title, and the title says everything and nothing.

The set that works: one post stating a real position on something in your industry, one piece of third-party credibility such as a talk or an interview, and one item that serves whatever your current objective is, usually hiring. Skip the company website. Anyone who wants it can find it, and it converts a personal profile into a redirect.

Our role data suggests executives are the group most likely to be publishing safely. Across executive accounts (2,775 posts from 11 authors), heavy hashtag use of four or more tags runs 27.8% in that role's own top decile (277 posts, 11 authors) against 60.2% in its own bottom half (1,388 posts, 6 authors), and the top group carries far more text-only posts, at 30.7% against 7.8%. Plain writing with fewer tags is what distinguishes the strongest executive posts from the weakest ones in the same group. The post worth featuring is usually the one that sounded least like a corporate announcement. More at LinkedIn for executives.

How many Featured items is too many?

More than four, in almost every case.

Featured renders as a horizontal carousel. On desktop, roughly two to three cards are visible before a visitor has to click an arrow. On mobile it is closer to one and a half. Every item after the visible set requires an action, and the fraction of visitors who take that action is small. So item seven is not adding an option, it is pushing your booking link out of view.

There is a second cost. A long Featured section reads as an archive rather than a selection, and selection is a signal. Four items says these are the four things worth your time. Eleven says here is everything I have ever made. The second is less flattering than it feels while you are adding them.

Order deliberately. LinkedIn lets you rearrange, so put the item that best serves your current objective first rather than accepting reverse-chronological order.

How often should you refresh the Featured section?

Quarterly as a floor, plus immediately whenever the action you want changes.

The failure mode is specific and common: a Featured section pinned to an event that has already happened. A webinar from 2024, a hiring post for a filled role, a launch that shipped. Each of those tells a visitor the profile is unattended, which colours everything else on the page including the parts that are current. An empty Featured section is neutral. A stale one is negative.

A quarterly pass takes ten minutes:

• Does the action slot still point at the thing I want people to do this quarter?
• Has a post outperformed the one in slot one since I last looked?
• Is any item referencing a date that has passed?
• Does the set read as four things chosen by a person, or as an accumulation?

Attach it to something you already do quarterly so you do not rely on remembering. The same cadence works for the rest of the profile optimization pass.

How do you tell whether your Featured section is working?

LinkedIn does not report clicks on Featured items, which is the honest constraint here. You cannot measure it directly on the platform. Three workarounds, in order of effort.

1. Use tracked URLs. Add a query parameter to every external link in Featured. Your own analytics will then tell you exactly how much traffic the section sends and which item sends it. This is the only measurement that is actually clean.
2. Watch the ratio of profile views to inbound. If profile views are climbing and messages are flat, the profile is not converting, and Featured is one of the two places to look. The other is the top of About. Diagnostics in how to get more LinkedIn profile views.
3. Ask. When someone books or messages you, ask what they read first. Ten answers will tell you more than any dashboard, and people are usually happy to say.

Then act on it. If the action item gets no clicks across a quarter of decent traffic, the problem is usually the title rather than the offer. Rewrite the title as an outcome before you conclude that nobody wants the thing.

Where does Featured fit in the rest of the profile?

It is the third thing a visitor encounters, after the introduction block and the top of About. That ordering changed in March 2024, when LinkedIn moved About to the top of the profile, per its help documentation on that wave of changes. The practical effect is that Featured now sits closer to the fold than it used to, and the three lines of About directly above it are effectively the introduction to your Featured items.

Use that. If your About section ends by naming the problem you solve, and slot three of Featured is the thing someone with that problem should click, the two fields work as one unit. Most profiles have those two elements written by different people at different times about different things.

And keep the proportions honest. Featured is worth twenty minutes a quarter. The reason a good Featured section is worth anything at all is that people arrive at your profile, and people arrive at your profile because you published something. In our cohort the median post earns 0.40 engagements per 1,000 followers while the 90th percentile earns 5.95, a roughly fifteenfold spread among the same set of established creators. That spread is where the traffic comes from, and it is the subject of our study of 34,012 LinkedIn posts and a working LinkedIn content strategy.