The Importance of the LinkedIn Personal Headline

It’s easily overlooked, but the right LinkedIn personal headline can make a huge difference on your outreach, especially if you’re relying on founder-led sales.

That’s because your LinkedIn headline is the first impression people get when they find you on LinkedIn.

If it’s good, they’ll want to learn more about you. But if it’s not, people will skip over you unless they have a good reason not to.

Here are two instances of the importance of LinkedIn headlines in action from my own personal experience of using LinkedIn as an outreach channel.

Example 1: Increasing follower count

Before I made the update, my LinkedIn headline was simply:

After taking a short sales course and reading about how to craft a better headline, I ultimately settled on a longer, more elaborate option that still serves as my headline:

While I can’t be 100% certain of a direct cause-and-effect, the day-to-day change in my follower count suggests that updating my headline paid dividends.

With my old headline, I was averaging 4 new followers per day. But with the new headline, my new daily followers nearly doubled as I started growing ~7 followers a day.

One small change. One big difference.

Example 2: Screening connection requests

Over the past year, I’ve tried to make it a habit to post once a day on LinkedIn, commenting on others’ posts, and answering comments people leave on mine.

From time to time, one post gains considerable traction and goes viral, leading to lots of connection requests.

At first, I accepted all of them. But over time, this seemed a bit irresponsible, so I started checking out each request.

One of my primary criteria for deciding who to accept and deny was the headline.

I accepted requests from people with headlines in my area of interest (e.g. startups, AI, sales) and denied the rest.

So what should your LinkedIn headline say?

Your LinkedIn headline functions as your personal brand.

It should include:

• What you do
• Why someone should connect with you
• How you can help
• Any interesting achievement

There are a couple of other steps you can take to craft a compelling headline:

• Use keywords so people can find you
• Use terms that your target audience will recognize
• Speak the language your audience understands
• Avoid hyperbole like “top-performing” or “world-class”

If you’ve successfully created a good headline, you should notice an immediate difference in the quantity and quality of connections you make on LinkedIn.