Profile and bio copy

What profile and bio copy is

Profile and bio copy is the small set of fixed fields on each social account: the bio or about section, the headline, the display name, the one link you are allowed, the text on the header image, and the pinned post where a platform offers one. Every field has a hard character limit, and on most platforms the whole thing comes to about two hundred characters that anyone actually reads.

It is written per account, because the limits differ and so does the reader. The LinkedIn headline is one line under a name. The Instagram bio is three short lines and a link. A Facebook page has a category, a short description and a longer one. Writing one description and pasting it into all of them produces a sentence that is truncated in two places and vague in the third.

It is not your boilerplate, which is the 50, 100 and 200-word description you are asked for by directories, programmes and partner sites. Boilerplate is where this work is cut down from, and if you have it, this job is quick. If you do not, the boilerplate is usually the better buy, because it feeds this and a dozen other places.

Who this is for

Any business with accounts whose bios were written on the day the account was opened and never read since. The usual state is a bio naming a service the business stopped selling, a link to a page that redirects, and a headline that says the job title and the company name and nothing a stranger could use.

The second case is a business whose posts have started working. People are arriving at the profile from a post, reading it, and leaving, because the profile does not answer the only question they came with.

You do not need this on accounts you are about to abandon. Decide which accounts survive first, which is social content strategy, then write bios for those. It is also not worth paying for one bio in isolation; the work is cheap because it is done across every account at once.

What gets written

• The one thing. Before anything else, the single fact a stranger must leave with: what you make, who for, and where. Everything in the fields is that fact in different lengths.
• The bio or about section. Written to the exact limit of each platform, and written so it still makes sense when the platform cuts it short on a phone, which most of them do.
• The headline and display name. The line under the name on LinkedIn, the name field on Instagram, the page category on Facebook. These are searched on, and most are wasted on a job title.
• The link and what sits behind it. One link on most platforms. I say which page it should go to, and tell you plainly where that page fails to keep the promise the bio made.
• The header and the pinned post. The words on the banner image, which are read before the bio, and the post you pin, which is the only content a visitor is guaranteed to see.

This is genuinely small work and I would rather say so. It is a few hundred words across every account you run. It is also almost never done, which is why an afternoon of it often does more than a month of posting.

What you get

The field sheet. One page per account, listing every field, the character limit, the text to paste in, and the count so you can see it fits. Written so whoever does the pasting has no decisions left to make.

The header notes. What the banner image should show and what words should sit on it, per platform, at the sizes each one uses. A designer or your own photographs can work from it.

The link note. Where each account should point, and if the destination needs work, the specific lines to change or a quote for a page built for the traffic.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Calgary company that installs and services commercial refrigeration runs four accounts. The LinkedIn company page headline says the company name and the word solutions. The Instagram bio is the word refrigeration and an emoji. The Facebook page is categorised as a local business with no description. The owner has a personal LinkedIn profile whose headline is his job title.

The one thing is settled in ten minutes on the call: commercial refrigeration installed and serviced across southern Alberta, with emergency callout. Everything follows from it. The LinkedIn page headline becomes that sentence in its exact character limit. The Instagram bio becomes three lines: what they do, who they do it for, and the callout number. Facebook gets a category, a short description and a long one, with service areas named because that is what people search there. The owner's own headline says what he fixes and for whom, because his profile receives more visits than the company page does. Four accounts, eleven fields, one afternoon of writing.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which accounts exist, who your customers are, and what one thing a stranger should leave knowing. That last question takes most of the half hour. No charge.
2. Access. A list of the accounts, or viewer access to them, plus your boilerplate and value proposition if they exist. Nothing else is needed.
3. The writing. Two to three working days for a set of accounts. Longer only where the one thing is genuinely unsettled, in which case I will tell you that is the real job.
4. Delivery. The field sheet, the header notes and the link note, with one revision round.

What it costs

This is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, and it is among the smallest figures on this site: a few hours across every account you run. Where your boilerplate and value proposition already exist, it costs less again, because the thinking is done. Where they do not, I will usually suggest the value proposition first and this as an inexpensive addition to it. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and the number is agreed in writing beforehand.

What happens next

A profile that answers the question is only useful if people arrive at it, so the next job is usually posting: captions written per platform, or posts from your own account where your buyers are other businesses. Many owners find while doing this that the description of the business they have been using for years is no longer accurate anywhere, which is boilerplate. And where the link now points somewhere that lets it down, that page needs a rewrite. This is complete work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.