Linkedin Headline Optimization Series: Do generic title terms have an industry bias?

Optimizing my Linkedin headline should have been easy. I've had "Traveler in South America" since the start of 2012, and I was ready to update it to reflect where I was both professionally and personally. But creating that one phrase to summarize who I was and what I had accomplished in my career turned out to be a much bigger challenge. I wanted to be professional, impressive, clever, and funny, all in the span of a sentence. I also had a new blog, which had already seen its first post, so this was no longer just about me, it was bigger than me.

So I turned to data to figure out the optimal term to feature in a headline.


My methodology was very simple, I used the Linkedin people search feature and each of the following terms one by one. This gave me numbers of profiles, that either matched to the headline, current job, or previous job titles. Based on how popular a term was, I could decide how to blend in or stand out.

So here is my starting point:

manager	9,591,802
executive	2,536,426
consultant	4,067,772
associate	2,337,363
analyst	2,272,782
specialist	2,272,776
planner	358,392
expert	678,437
resident	227,301
hacker	19,206

Why these ten terms? Because at this point in my career I'm still a generalist. I have an liberal arts background. Sure I've focused on online advertising for the past four years, but I need a broader term - a term that sounds cool but says absolutely nothing and everything at once.

So now that I had my 24 million profiles, I can jump to my first finding.

1. If you work in Marketing, your profile probably says "manager".

Want to bet? $10? $1,000,000? About a million profiles in Marketing use the term "manager." Everyone seems to be a manager these days - Account Manager, Social Media Manager, Marketing Manager, Brand Manager, Analytics Manager, Digital Marketing Manager, etc. When did we stop saying "job" and start using "manager"? Isn't the Social Media Manager just the guy responsible for the social media. I'm surprised my mechanic hasn't started calling himself an "Automotive Manager."

How blatant is this overuse? Almost half of the Marketing profiles come up for "manager." 

That's moderately interesting, but what if we zoom out from Marketing and Advertising?

2. The most "managers" work in Information Technology and Services.

Over 2 million profiles return for the phrase manager in Information Technology and Services (IT). Marketing and Advertising has been bumped to the third spot with only 1 million profiles. This leads me to my next finding.

3. Information Technology and Services profiles dominate Linkedin

Unfortunately Linkedin doesn't let you simply do an Advanced search by industry. But from only the 10 keyword phrases that I searched (this number is probably horribly wrong because it's counting many profiles several times but it's the best I can do without accessing the API) I was able to return 5 million profiles in IT.

4. Information Technology and Services dominates the terms: "executive", "consultant", "associate", "analyst", "specialist", "expert", and "hacker".

The fact that IT has the most profiles is likely an indication of it's dominance of Linkedin and its wide array of roles. 

5. Planners work in Marketing and Residents work in Healthcare.

The only two categories not dominated by IT were "planners" and "residents." This is likely because they are still very specific to their industry (Marketing and Healthcare, respectively) despite the occasional cropping up of "Resident Social Media Managers." I wonder how long it will be before these terms are generic enough to be adopted outside of their current industry.

Besides making a whole slew of charts, I was no closer to optimizing my Linkedin headline. Was my only finding that a lot of Linkedin users worked in Information Technology? Actually, not exactly. What I had found was that of the ten generic terms I started with, certain terms were industry independent (e.g. manager, executive, consultant) and certain terms still had industry connotations (e.g. planner and resident).

There had actually been one other term that had industry connotations - hacker.

You'll notice that hacker is popular only in IT, Computer & Network Security, Computer Software, etc, etc, until you get to Marketing and Advertising in the 7th slot. My read of this is that it's a term growing in popularity in the Marketing field, but with still strong technology ties. 

Back to my Linkedin Headline. Since the goal is to improve the likelihood of appearing on relevant searches, and standing out from the crowd on first impression, I decided on:

Sam Feldman
Marketing, Data, and Technology Hacker

What are your takeaways for Linkedin SEO?

• Make sure you've got the most popular terms covered in your job titles. If your job titles aren't flexible, make sure you use the description or headline field to make your profile findable.
• Industry-specific terms should be predominant in your profile
• At the same time give yourself some edge with a new word or phrase that's slowly emerging into your industry.

In my next blog post I'll take a look at whether various titles have an affinity for different cities, and then after that whether certain universities produce certain titles of jobs.

As always I welcome your comments and feedback below.