GLOSSARY · LINKEDIN MECHANICS
About section
The About section is the free-text summary near the top of a LinkedIn profile, with a limit of 2,600 characters. Only the first few lines display before a "see more" link, so the opening must earn the click. It is the one place on the profile where a member can speak to a visitor in their own words, explain who they help, how, and with what evidence, and say what the visitor should do next. Search inside LinkedIn indexes it, so the terms a buyer might use belong there, written naturally rather than stuffed.
How it works in practice
Most About sections are either an autobiography or a list of adjectives, and neither helps a stranger decide whether to talk to you. A useful structure answers four questions in order. Who do you help, specifically? The reader should recognise themselves or know within a sentence that this is not for them. What problem do you solve, in the reader's language rather than your method's? Why should they believe you: proof points, a named result, a credential, the work you can show. And what should they do now: follow, subscribe, message, book. Write in the first person, keep paragraphs short because the section is read on phones, and put the most important sentence first, since that is all most people see before expanding.
Avoid the fluff that LinkedIn summaries attract: "passionate", "results-driven", "dynamic" and their relatives. Include the terms a buyer would search for, such as your role, your specialism and your market, because LinkedIn's people search reads this section. Do not include contact details you would not want scraped, but do say how to reach you. The About section should agree with the headline and the Featured items; together they make one argument. Rewrite it when your positioning changes, which for most founders is at least once a year.
Example
Opening line: "I work with Series A SaaS founders who are posting on LinkedIn and getting likes from peers instead of calls from buyers." The rest explains the method, names two results with permission, and ends with a line about the newsletter.
Common mistake
Writing the About section in the third person, as a bio. It reads as if copied from a conference programme, and it wastes the only part of the profile where the person can actually talk to the visitor.