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How to Write a LinkedIn About Section People Actually Read
By Dr. Nkem Ezeamama · · 5 min read
The About section is the most-skipped part of the LinkedIn profile and the most valuable one. It is the only place where you get to explain yourself in your own voice, at length, without a character limit breathing down your neck. Most people waste it by writing a résumé in paragraph form.
Here is what to do instead.
Only the first two lines are guaranteed to be read
LinkedIn truncates the About section after roughly three lines on desktop and fewer on mobile. Everything after that sits behind a "see more" link that most visitors never click.
So your opening cannot be a warm-up. "I am a results-driven professional with over 15 years of experience" is a sentence that has never made anyone click see more. Open with the thing that makes someone want the rest: a specific claim, a real number, or the problem you solve stated plainly.
Compare:
- Before: "Experienced healthcare leader passionate about driving outcomes."
- After: "Three years ago I was an ER physician with no audience. Today capital partners find me through what I write."
A structure that holds up
Four movements, in this order:
- The hook. Two lines. Specific, concrete, and true. Earn the click.
- The turn. What changed, and why you do what you do now. This is where people decide whether they trust you. Facts build credibility; the reason behind them builds trust.
- The proof. Three or four lines of evidence — outcomes, numbers, names, scale. Not a duties list.
- The invitation. One clear next step. What should someone do if this resonated? Message you? Book a call? Read something?
Write it in first person
Third person ("Nkem is a physician and investor who…") reads as though someone else wrote it, which creates distance at exactly the moment you want closeness. First person is the norm on LinkedIn and it is warmer. Use it.
Specific beats impressive
The instinct is to reach for the biggest, roundest claims. Resist it. "Helped numerous organisations achieve significant growth" is impressive-sounding and completely empty. "Raised $153M in assets under management, every capital partner sourced through LinkedIn content" is smaller in wording and enormously bigger in effect.
Specificity is what separates a profile people believe from one they scroll past. If you can replace a number with a bigger one and the sentence still works, the sentence was never saying anything.
Keywords still matter here
The About section is indexed by LinkedIn search, so the phrases you chose for your headline should appear naturally in the body too. Naturally is the operative word — write for the person, then check that the terms are present, not the other way round.
End with one door, not five
A closing line that offers four options — connect, message, email, book, subscribe — gets none of them chosen. Pick the single action that matters most right now and ask for it directly.
"If you are a professional trying to build visibility outside your job title, send me a message. I read all of them."
What to do if you have no numbers
Not everyone has assets under management to point at. Plenty of valuable work does not produce a headline figure, and the advice to "lead with results" can feel impossible if you are a teacher, a researcher, a public servant or early in a career change.
Specificity is still available to you — it just takes a different form. Scale ("across four departments"), duration ("eleven years in paediatric intensive care"), difficulty ("the cases nobody else wanted"), or the concrete before-and-after of a single situation you handled. One vivid detail does more than a vague superlative.
The test is not whether the number is big. It is whether a reader could picture what you actually did.
Common questions
How long should the About section be?
The field allows 2,600 characters. Somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 is comfortable for most people — long enough to tell a story, short enough that it does not become an essay. Length is much less important than whether the first two lines earn the click.
Should I write it with AI?
Use it to get a first draft out of your head and to tighten sentences, then rewrite it in your own words. AI drafts default to a flat, agreeable register that reads as generic, and a generic About section is worse than a short one.
How often should I update it?
Whenever your focus changes, and otherwise about twice a year. It is the section people most often write once and forget for five years.
Does anyone actually read it?
The people who matter do. Casual scrollers never get past your headline, but anyone seriously considering working with you, hiring you or investing alongside you will read the whole thing before they make contact. It is a small audience doing high-value reading, which is precisely why it repays the afternoon it takes to write properly.
A short checklist before you publish
- Do the first two lines work with the rest hidden?
- Is there a specific number, name, or outcome in the first half?
- Is it in first person?
- Does it say who it is for?
- Is there exactly one call to action?
- Have you read it aloud? If it is hard to say, it is hard to read.
LinkedIn's profile editing guide covers where to find the field. The writing is on you — but it is an afternoon's work that pays out every time someone lands on your profile for the next several years.
Once the profile is doing its job, the next question is what to publish. Start with the five post types, or take the whole system in order inside LinkedIn Unlocked.