Does Your LinkedIn Headline Tell Your Story?

This week on my online community I've been helping our members with their LinkedIn headlines. The headline on your LinkedIn profile turns out to be really important, because if another LinkedIn user performs a search on the LinkedIn user database and you're included in the search results, your name and your LinkedIn headline are the only things that user will see before having to decide whether to click through to your full profile, or not.

That means your LinkedIn headline matters. Here are a few of the LinkedIn headline "befores" and "afters" from my exercise with the online community members this week. (I've included my comments so you can see where I was going branding-wise in each case.)

LINKEDIN HEADLINE EXAMPLE ONE: LET'S NAME THE WIN

Hi, Liz.

This is a great offer - thanks very much! It made me rework my headline before
sending it to you, which was a great exercise - made me pin down what I really
do. You make me think.

Remember the exercise a year or so back where we described what we did in plain
English and in less than 10 words? How would that line adapt to a LinkedIn
headline?

I'm the go-getter extra staff for small nonprofits when they need help finding,
following and matching funders to their worthy nonprofit projects.

Charlotte

Hi Charlotte!

What about

Non-Profit Consultant: I find funding for my clients' projects

?

That would get you some inquiries, for sure. As long as you have some concrete
problem-solution-impact stories to share at that point, you'd be in great shape!
Liz

LINKEDIN HEADLINE EXAMPLE TWO: DON'T AFRAID TO NAME YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Dear Liz,

Oh my gosh!
I just looked at my headline and thought "wow what am I thinking!" How ordinary.

Current: Massage Therapist, owner Whole Body Healing, LLC

Thanks for asking me to look at it again!, This is technically career #3, but
career two was a flash in the pan.

So should I focus on being a in home therapist? or I have two goals in my
business, 1- working with women and their health from prenatal through menopause
and 2 - working to empower people to lose their stress to manage their chronic
illnesses through massage and healthy lifestyle changes?.

I did not realize I was so lacking in my title!

Thanks for any and all help!

Carroll



Hi Carroll !

It sounds like you're focusing on these two audiences:

1) People with chronic health issues
2) Women

You can include those two groups in your headline if you like. You could say

Massage Therapist and Wellness Coach focused on women and people with chronic
illness

We think "I'll brand myself too narrowly, and I won't hear from anyone." And it
works in just the opposite way. People come out of the woodwork to talk to you
because they're curious. "What is it about women and people with chronic
illness?" they'll ask you. "I'm a healthy 40-year-old man, can I get a massage?"
and then you can decide.

Best,

Liz

LINKEDIN HEADLINE EXAMPLE THREE: USE A HUMAN VOICE

Good morning Liz and thank you for your offer to provide advice on our LinkedIn
Headlines. Here is my current one (which I redid after reading your feedback to
others). I struggle a bit with LinkedIn, as I have a few areas of focus or
"prongs" that I am persuing for my next role along with a very strong desire to
work globally - Program management, Change management/change consultant, and
Learning Dev/Talent Management. Here is my headline:

"Orchestrator of projects and programs; a global strategist, change navigator
and people enabler"

Meghan

Hi Meghan!

Thanks for sending over your LinkedIn headline. I am 100% certain that you are
sparkly and amazing in person and on the phone, so this headline isn't doing you
justice yet. It's too broad, for my taste, and too general. This is
business-speak that doesn't give us anything to grab onto -- there's no picture,
no story in this kind of language.

There is a tendency these days to use kingly branding like "Enabler of teams and
Designer of systems;" that sort of thing always makes me think of the
description of Miles Gloriosus, the comical-braggart-ultra-macho Roman general
in the Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." Here's
how Miles describes himself when he arrives to fetch the wife he had pre-ordered
from the wife-and-concubine merchant Marcus Lycus (in the song "Bring Me My
Bride"):

I, Miles Gloriosus
I, slaughterer of thousands
I, oppressor of the meek
Subduer of the weak
Degrader of the Greek
Destroyer of the Turk
Must hurry back to work.

Let's get the global thing in there Meghan, because that's a priority for you.
What about something like "Org Development Manager, globally-focused, passionate
about growing leaders from scratch and keeping sharp people on board?"

That sample headline has a few problems: it's seven characters too long,
'passionate' may not be your cup of tea word-choice-wise and these may not
actually be your priorities on the job; but you get the idea. We want to be as
down-to-earth and human as possible given the constraints of the LinkedIn
headline writing exercise. We want to put a picture in the reader's head, and
"growing leaders from scratch" moves in that direction. "Keeping sharp people on
board" is more concrete than "developing teams" and the usual OD yada-yada.

The more concrete we can be in the headline, the more branding will come
through. It is hard to shake the idea that we should write a headline or a
LinkedIn profile or a resume so as not to offend anyone. Safe branding is no
branding at all. We're trying to pull in the right people and push the rest away
-- violently!

Enjoy your Sunday Meghan--

Yours,

Liz