Social Business Success

One question that most people are afraid to answer because they don’t know how to answer it properly is “What do you do?”  This is a very popular question that is asked at any kind of gathering such as a networking event or a family celebration.

Here in the United States, we seem to want to know what a person does for a living.  It’s important that we answer that question properly in order make a good impression.  The same is true with writing the headline in our LinkedIn profile.

When hiring managers are searching to fill a position or find a person to connect with to do business, people will search by key words.

To help you write your LinkedIn headline, one way to start is think of how you would answer the question what do you do?  Research the different job titles in your field.  Put yourself in the hiring manger’s shoes if you needed to find a person that does what you do.  What are all of the different positions called that do what you do?  Read job descriptions for positions to which you apply.  Might there be some words in that job description you would be able to use in your headline?

Another way to help expand the words for your headline is to use a word cloud.  An example of a word cloud program is wordle.net.  Wordle.net explains their product as “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text”.  The larger the word appears in the word cloud, the more prominent the word is.

An example of a Word Cloud

LinkedIn gives you 120 characters for your headline.  User each character wisely.  Don’t use words that don’t do anything or filler words like “and”, “or”.  Those are the two most common ones.  Also make sure your profile includes four key words.  These key words are what people will use in the keyword to search for an individual.

Make sure you have researched all the different type of words people will use to describe what you do, what your occupation is or what your product or service does.