How to Write Your Short Bio for Social Media, Websites and More

Even if you’re not a writer, at some point in your career you’ll need to put into words the story of your personal and professional life. It’s usually called a bio, profile, or “About.”

A long bio can be anything from several pages to a memoir to a set of journals without end.

A short bio is a one-paragraph summary about yourself, used primarily to establish your credibility and personal brand.

Just about every social media site on the Internet — from Instagram and Facebook, to X (Twitter), to Bluesky, or LinkedIn — requires you to post a bio. Sometimes it’s called a profile or “About.” Google’s algorithms look at your Abouts and your first sentence, which should explain who you are and what you do. These short paragraphs wield SEO power.

Without a short bio, you have to keep reinventing the wheel.

You don’t want to do that. Write your short bio by focusing on the most important elements about yourself. From it, you can create multiple versions for:

• Social media
• Your own website
• Your company’s website
• Cover letters for your resume
• Nominations for awards
• Speech introductions
• Presentations at conferences
• Your book, journal, ebook

Your short bio communicates your personal brand — although your brand is more than just words. It’s a collection of images, competencies, and values that others associate with you.

Template for a short bio

The short bio should convey your personal brand through these four elements:

1. Who you are. Who you are includes such things as your name, occupation, background, image, voice, personality, skill set, talent, and perceived power and standing in the food chain.

2. What you are passionate about. This can include not only what you do for a living (if you love your job), but also your hobbies, values, and how you contribute to your favorite causes and your community.

3. How you benefit others. Who do you help and how do you help them? This is about how you provide value and benefits to the market, your industry, or your company. It can include specialized knowledge, or services and products that your customers consider worth their time and money.

4. What makes you different. How do you stand out from your competition? Your personal brand lets the public know the answer to this question. Sometimes it can be something as simple as the number of awards you’ve won.

Should the order of the four elements always be the same?

No. But you do always start with element #1, Who you are. Then you can switch the order of elements #2, #3, and #4 as you see fit. Here’s a template, below, using an example of a bio taken from the back cover of a novel written by one of my clients (he wrote his own bio):

Example of a short bio for an author

1. Who you are / What you do
(Rick Evans is a writer and speaker)

2. What makes you different
(who is adept at presenting complex, paradigm-shifting ideas in a clear, crisp, accessible way — with humor)

3. What you are passionate about
(and whose topics focus on the expansion of human consciousness)

4. How you benefit others
(Rick’s novel provides a nourishing introduction to those whose soul yearns for a deeper truth and for a way out of the cage they find themselves in).

Rick’s resulting one-paragraph bio reads as follows. Notice that he provides the “How you benefit others” element of his bio through the display of an endorsement on his book’s back cover, instead of within the body of the short bio itself:

Rick Evans is a writer and speaker whose topics focus on the expansion of human consciousness. He is adept at presenting complex, paradigm-shifting ideas in a clear, crisp, accessible way — with humor. His writing draws from his personal spiritual path of over 30 years, stimulated most recently by the works of A.H. Almaas, Eckhart Tolle and David Deida. Mr. Evans is a trained public speaker as well as a writer.

This novel provides a nourishing introduction to those whose soul yearns for a deeper truth and for a way out of the cage they find themselves in. It is a wonderful and special addition to spiritual path literature. -JF, Spiritual Teacher