It's Bio-logy: how to optimize social media bios

Imagine that the first time you met everyone—instead of faces, voices, and personalities—they were shrouded by a canvas on which was typed a 150-character description of who they are. That was it. You could look down and get a glimpse into the way they dress themselves up, but that short paragraph was the biggest insight you had into who the various people you met actually are.

Oh, and you had one, too.

Wouldn’t you want yours to be as pithy, concise, clear, engaging, accurate, and useful as possible? First impressions are everything, after all.

Your social media bios are this very thing. People who find your accounts could go for a scroll to try to dig up what they need to know, but the fact of the matter is that most people don’t. They want to get the SparkNotes version of you and your brand’s essence right off the bat.

Search engines like it, too. With social media platforms becoming more and more search-powered, and 10% of Gen-Z audiences preferring them (TikTok in particular) to major search engines like Google, maxxing out your keywords as best you can helps people find you when they type something in that search bar.

So what does a fully-optimized social media bio look like?

Let’s find out!

Different platforms, different limits
Each social media platform has their own set character limit for bios:

Instagram + Threads: 150 characters

Facebook: 100 characters

LinkedIn (“About” section): 2,600 characters

TikTok: 80 characters

Lemon8: 80 characters

Pinterest: 500 characters

X: 160 characters

As you can see, you can’t use the exact same social media bio across every social media platform. The first lesson here is that you shouldn’t pin your social media strategy in doing the same thing across all your social media networks because they’re all different.

Oh, also: if you haven’t changed your Facebook bio in a couple years, put it on your to-do list. They lowered their bio character limit and any page with a bio longer than 101 characters has an incomplete bio. I run into so many business pages with bios that end in the middle of a sentence because of this—oops!

What’s in a bio?

Whatever platform you’re on, there are some key things to consider when deciding what’s going to make the cut for your bio. With so few characters to work with on most platforms, you have to be concise, so you may need to be ruthless with your bio length decision-making. Here are some important things to consider:

The words people would use to find the products or services you offer
People who don’t know you can’t look for you by your name. They have to use generic search terms to help them find what they’re looking for. For example, if you’re a lawncare business, people are searching for “lawn maintenance” and “landscaping”. Those terms need to be in your bios.

Your location
If you have a brick-and-mortar location/office or are targeting certain communities, it’s crucial to have those in your bio somehow. People want to #supportlocal and they want to know where your businesses are located. Plus it makes you easier for locals to find you, including nearby businesses who are seeking out connections themselves with their outbound strategy.

My Pinterest bio, including the areas I consider my target market for SEO.

Any brand messaging that sets you apart
This doesn’t mean you copy/paste your business’ slogan/motto in your bio, though, depending on what it is, you could. Rather, it means that your brand positioning should be clear from your bio. Are you a “dog kennel,” or are you a “luxury resort for furry family members”? The downfall here can be balancing the need to use keywords and highlighting your brand positioning—a wire act when it comes to character limits.

My Instagram bio, including my positioning as a brand that cares about honesty and ethics with the phrase “Marketing as empathy.”

Try bullet points
People zone out with big bodies of text. That’s why, whenever I can, even on my blog, I don’t put more than 3 sentences together before hitting return. Bullet points are your friend because they help whoever is reading the bio organize the words they’re reading and know that everything that’s there is important, rather than being left to rank the relevance of the information on their own.

Who your business or page is for
In particular if you’re in the professional services industries (marketing, accounting, bookkeeping, consulting, coaching, etc.), perhaps even more important than what you do is who you do it for. “I’m a bookkeeper” is weak, “Supporting female-owned businesses through empowering bookkeeping services and consulting” is stronger because it makes it clear off the bat who your target market is and makes them feel seen.

My Facebook bio, calling out who my services are for: nonprofits and small businesses in Central Illinois.

The supporting cast

Your bio is very important. But it does have some helpers. Your profiles have other fields that can help. For example, on Facebook, you can include everything from your address to your hours at the top of your page. On Pinterest, you have a cover photo and even the way you organize your boards to help communicate who you are.

So here are some extra tips and recommendations:

• Use your cover photo to convey something about you/your business (Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and X)

• Use your highlights (Instagram)—make cute, consistently-branded highlight covers and use highlights as a sort of publicly-accessible archive that you can use to guide your audience to the information you believe is most important to them.

• A profile picture that is actually you—it’s so tempting to use your logo, but for most platforms (Facebook might be an exception to this, but even Facebook sometimes, too!), you want to use a picture of your face.

• Bigger brands, franchises, etc. will find that this doesn’t necessarily work well for them because at that point, the brand goes so far beyond one person that using one person’s face is ridiculous. This insight is primarily for small businesses and startups.

• Pinned posts are a great way to identify the most important posts you’ve made and help folks identify that they should start with those posts. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Threads all allow you to pin posts to the top of your page!

Our social media thankfully do have a little more to help complete the picture than our hypothetical faceless people we considered at the beginning of the blog here. But even so, the idea does stand: your bio needs to capture people from the moment they lay eyes on it.

Want an IG profile optimization and grid review? I’m excited to offer this as an a la carte service for a low one-time investment. Click here to learn more, and shoot me a message on the contact page to get started!