The Dos and Don’ts of Writing Your LinkedIn Summary

Written by ilex | 30-Dec-2019 11:49:00

Whether you are a B2B business owner or an employee, ensuring your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date, polished and professional is a great way to represent your company. LinkedIn profiles can often be viewed by potential customers, so you want to ensure that their first impression of you, as a representative of your company, is a good one.

The Most Important Part of Your Profile

While all aspects of your profile are important on LinkedIn to paint a full picture of yourself as a person, the summary is often considered the most important.

This short piece of text is the first snapshot of information that any profile viewer will see about you, alongside your profile photo. It’s therefore vital to communicate the main points that you want people to know about you, both personally and professionally.

While a LinkedIn summary is a fairly short piece of writing, it’s important to get it right. Many people make the mistake of writing their summary the same as it would appear on a CV, but on LinkedIn it should appear more ‘human’ and genuine.

Writing about yourself can be a daunting task, so we’ve come up with the main dos and don’ts of writing your LinkedIn summary to help simplify the process.

DO	DON'T
Write in first person. Writing in first person can immediately make your summary feel more genuine compared to a CV summary, which is often presented in third person. You should use a natural, conversational tone to come across as authentic and showcase your values.	Include too much. While it might be tempting to list every single personal quality, job role and achievement in your summary, this can lead to overcrowding with irrelevant information. With a limit of 2,000 characters and only the first two lines appearing before viewers have to click to ‘read more’, it’s important that your summary grabs attention and immediately tells readers why you are good at what you do.
Tell a short story. Your LinkedIn summary should be written like a short story, explaining what you do, and why you do it. It’s a great way to convince readers that what you do also reflects who you are as a person. Key information can include, but is not limited to, key aspects of your current role, specific accomplishments and how they benefitted your previous and/or current companies, and what you enjoy/are skilled at in your career.	Overuse buzz words. A common downfall when writing a LinkedIn summary is overusing common ‘buzz words’ such as ‘motivated’ and ‘passionate’ (see more here: https://bit.ly/2QhlpX9). If readers consistently see these same common words, they are likely to be less interested in your profile and may even view you as being insincere. If you are genuinely ‘passionate’ about your work, it should be reflected in the way you write about it.
Use keywords. Using key, industry-relevant words in your summary makes your profile easier to find in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) and LinkedIn search results. It also ensures that viewers of your profile trust that you are experienced in your field, which reflects well on your B2B company.	Just make a list of job tasks. Although some job tasks can be important to communicate on your LinkedIn profile, the summary is not the best place to do this. Simply listing various job tasks gives readers no insight into your skills, and how your work benefits your company. Unless there are a couple of crucial tasks that need to be communicated in your summary, it’s better to only include key information and save specific tasks for your work experience section.

By following these tips, you can produce a summary that entices customers to read more about you and your company. Ensuring this often-overlooked section is refined and professional is a great way to improve your presence on LinkedIn.

If you would like to learn more about how to write a professional LinkedIn summary that reflects well on your B2B company, you can book a meeting with us here:

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