With pretty much every social site letting you write about yourself, how do you approach developing your "About Me"?
I can think of a few sites where this applies:
- dev.to and other blog-ish platforms
- GitHub and other code platforms
- LinkedIn summaries and headlines
- Facebook public profiles
- Each StackExchange site
- Personal websites / portfolios
- Pluralsight and other learning platforms
- The new reddit userpages
- Anything with a concept of a profile, really.
Do you go fun and quirky or professional and informational? Do you write about what you do, what you've done, or what you want to get into? How does your "personal branding" change across each site?
Top comments (6)
I'm terrible at writing biographies, as my biography in this site can testify. Unless I expect an outcome (like in my LinkedIn profile) I usually don't even bother. Mostly because I find it hard to describe myself and because I think very few people are going to find it relevant or interesting.
I liked your bio, though it made me think "DS9 was better! Dax4lyfe" 😇
Hahaha! I have to admit that I never watched DS9, I'll have to do it some day.
I find it terribly embarrassing to write the truth about myself in any way that isn't self-deprecating, so I don't. I go for silly, instead, because I reckon people will see that as confidence and without-a-care-ness. Or something.
On LinkedIn my entire profile is stupid. My endorsements are all D&D stats (hey, I have an Intelligence stat of 14 so I can probably hold a conversation at least)
On Quora I put in a different bio for each answer category. They're almost all irreverent and irrelevant.
I don't do Facebook, but I have an account there. I'm proud of my profile picture, but that's about it - and it's not my face (or any part of me).
My personal site doesn't have any links to any of its pages (it's all a secret, right) but the index page and 404 page have my beautiful face on them, so there's that. No text. Nothing to give the game away.
Twitter/Mastodon is about the most honest you'll see me. Everywhere else there's a wall between personal information and what I want to share with the world... so I go quirky. I wouldn't say it's a personal brand, more the absence of one, though.
I'm picturing the LinkedIn headline is what I actually do now (Software Test Engineer), while the summary more focusing on what I've done (Jasmine testing of Angular webapps and other buzzwords).
StackExchange should be targetted to each subsite. The math exchange isn't going to care about my 1337 JS skillz.
Ignoring Facebook and reddit since Facebook should be kept locked down and reddit profiles are dumb.
Pluralsight, GitHub, here, Medium, homepage... no clue.
When possible I like to mention that I’m Canadian! People seem to like meeting Canadians. 🙂