Get to the point with your headline, and don't just add your job title and employer name.
You have a headline below your name on LinkedIn. The reason it's called a headline is that it comes at the top, and it's what people see and read first.
It also appears every time you make a comment or share something on LinkedIn. As a default, LinkedIn suggests that it's your current job title and company you use as your headline.
That's bad advice. Don't use that information alone in your headline.
You have up to 220 characters to use in your headline. So there's plenty of room to add a few descriptive words or phrases that will interest people and be found in a search.
Tip: Don't be tempted to overstuff the headline with keywords. You want to maintain legibility, and a shorter version of roughly the first 40 characters will appear on updates you share.
Use your headline to describe what you're good at, what you deliver, and why it's worth reading your profile and connecting with you. Here's a simple formula: "[Job title]: helping X do Y."
Imagine it as a quick introduction so that people want to know more. Don't include your email, phone or web address - this just makes you look pushy or plain desperate.
Be careful, too, with the use of emojis — they can look frivolous and unprofessional if over-used in a headline, and may not appear on every platform, especially mobile devices.
A good tip is to only use characters from the UTF-8 character set — these will display safely on all devices.
Avoid self-aggrandising hyperbole and clichés, such as describing yourself as an Acknowledged Expert or being Results-Driven. Nobody believes that stuff. You'll just come across as being arrogant, insecure, and self-involved.
Your headline is also important because it's heavily weighted relative to other information in any LinkedIn search - so why not choose a few keywords that potential customers will search for, and find you with?
You can include geographical indicators so that people can locate you in the areas you operate. 'Plumber in Seattle' is going to work better than just 'Plumber'.
Tip: The text in your headline (and your current job title) is also effective for searches in Google, Bing and other search engines. You can get quite spectacular first page search results on competitive search phrases from careful work here.
You can also include #hashtags that you use for your updates in your headline for visibility for all of your content across LinkedIn.
There are at least two forms of your headline - one shorter version people see when they view your content in most situations, and the full length version seen when they view your profile.
Here are some examples where the headline does not work because of a cutoff:
Business Development Consultant, XYZ Global Enterprises...
Development Team Lead / Project Manager at ABC Corporation...
EMEA Senior asset/procurement management at Fishface Plc...
Director - Resources, Energy and Power at Bigshot Acme...
General Manager, Direct Channels at Smallfry Ad...
None of these headlines sells, tells or really says anything memorable, other than perhaps rather negatively implying that the subject of the headline has not really thought about how they present themselves to the world on LinkedIn.
The issue with these, and many examples on LinkedIn, are that people are concentrating on cramming their current job title in there as the first part of the headline.
Your job title is not your headline.
It's not the lead!
So please — use your headline to sell yourself to your visitors!
Lead with the main story, and test it to make sure your headline makes sense (or at least intrigues) when it breaks at (currently) around 40 or 70 characters, and also works at its full length of up to 220.
And please use simple language. "Homo sapiens engages with canine" is not as good as "Man bites dog" when it comes down to getting attention!
The classic questions people want to know in the lead of a news story are who, what, where, why, when, and very often - how much? So make your headline do the same: introduce an interesting story.
Use your LinkedIn headline to introduce a story - and make the reader want to read the full story. And remember to check the spelling!
Jobseekers need to have a headline that will make their ideal employers choose to click through on them in the search results page more than other candidates competing for attention in the same search results. So be very clear about what your career entails and give yourself a USP.
Eg. if wanting to secure a software sales job compare the headlines "Sales Manager at Smith & Grayson" with "Top Performing CRM Sales Manager focused on the SMB marketplace"
Then write an "About" section that is an elevator pitch that excites your recruiter reader to want to read the whole profile (rather than click the back button and go and look at another candidate - remember recruiters are time-poor with hundreds of potential candidate matches to trawl through in the search results).
By contrast, business people wanting to generate enquiries need to have a headline that appeals to your ideal clients and tells them how you can help them.
Eg. compare "Founder of Intelligent Financial Solutions" with "Helping Small Business Owners To Offload Their Accounting Chores" ; the latter is a constant reminder to small business owners that they should be looking at this person's profile, especially if they have accounting headaches!
Then it's important to write an "About" section that is a mixture of call-to-action (so people are prompted to book in for a call, message you, request a quote, etc.) and validation (possibly with social proof) of the problems you can help eradicate or the opportunities you can help that type of person to exploit.
