I Hate Social Media. I Just Overhauled My LinkedIn Anyway.

I don’t like social media. I’m not performing reluctance for effect here. I genuinely don’t enjoy it. I scroll X occasionally because it’s fast, blunt, and mostly text. Everything else feels like a part-time job I never applied for. So when I tell you that I just sat down and completely rewrote my LinkedIn profile for the first time in years, you should understand that this was not a fun Saturday project. It was an overdue reckoning with a page that no longer described who I am, what I’ve done, or what I actually bring to the table. And my wife said I should do it to reflect just that – it’ll open doors and opportunities.

And the process taught me something worth sharing: most professionals are walking around with a digital first impression that’s either outdated, generic, or actively working against them. Including me, until about a week ago.

 

The Problem with the Old Profile

I want to show you something. This is roughly what my LinkedIn About section looked like before the rewrite:

I’m a seasoned (digital) leader and strategist. I possess a genuine passion for a wide range of areas including (pre)sales, market strategy, business communications, negotiation, operational management, corporate culture, marketing, and process design.

It went on. It listed every hat I’d ever worn. It included a numbered list of personal values like “I am calm” and “I run towards fires.” It ended with a specialty list that read like someone had emptied a bag of LinkedIn keywords onto the page.

Here’s the thing: none of it was wrong. Everything in that bio was true. But it didn’t actually say anything. It was the professional equivalent of introducing yourself at a party by reading your entire resume out loud.Technically accurate, completely forgettable, and slightly exhausting. I’d written it years ago when I was trying to sound impressive to as many people as possible. And that, right there, is the trap. When you try to speak to everyone, you end up saying nothing to anyone.

 

What Changed

Over the past several years, my career has taken turns that the old profile didn’t reflect at all. A decade at HP and HPE. Managing $12M+ budgets, 400+ person teams, leading 120+ cross-border projects across Europe. Running the Order-to-Cash separation during the HP/HPE split. Taking over Lime Germany during COVID. Redesigning a decade-old workflow at DKV and saving €360K in four weeks.

And then the part nobody expected: my wife and I took a small tennis and padel facility in Mallorca and turned it into a five-star operation in two and a half years. Built the systems from scratch. Managed supplier relationships, bilingual content across hotel groups and municipalities, everything. None of that was on the old profile. The story of what I’d actually done, the pattern of how I work, the evidence that I deliver results in messy, complex, sometimes chaotic situations, all invisible. Replaced by buzzwords and a list of specialties that could have belonged to anyone.

So I rewrote it. And I did it with one principle: say what’s real and cut everything that isn’t.

 

The New Version

Here’s the opening line of my new About section:

“I fix what’s broken and build what’s missing.”

Nine words. That’s it. And it does more work than the 200 words of “seasoned digital leader” language that came before it.

The rest follows the same approach. Specific projects, specific numbers, specific outcomes. No jargon about “passion for cross-functional synergies.” Just evidence that when I show up, things get built, fixed, or made to work better than they were. The difference isn’t polish. It’s honesty. The old version was trying to impress. The new version is trying to be clear. Those are very different goals, and only one of them actually works.

 

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Let me share a number that made me sit up. Only about 1% of LinkedIn’s billion-plus users post content weekly. Those users generate roughly 9 billion impressions per week. That’s a staggering concentration of visibility among a tiny minority of active participants.

You don’t even need to post content to benefit from this dynamic. You just need a profile that works when someone lands on it. And people do land on it. Recruiters, potential clients, conference organizers, podcast hosts, collaborators, old colleagues who are now hiring. Your profile is the page they see before they decide whether to reach out or keep scrolling.

Profiles with complete, optimized information are significantly more likely to be discovered in searches. Professional photos alone increase profile views by a factor of roughly 20. Listing your current position increases connection requests by up to five times.

These aren’t marginal improvements. They’re the difference between existing on the platform and actually being found on it.

 

Why Most Profiles Don’t Work

I think there are a few patterns that keep people stuck with profiles that don’t represent them well.

The “everything” problem: You list every skill, every role, every competency you’ve ever touched – I dislike that. I have several certifications and what not but do not list everything online nor in my CV. The logic is: more keywords means more visibility, right? Maybe. But more keywords also means less clarity. When everything is a specialty, nothing is. A recruiter or hiring manager scanning your profile in six seconds doesn’t need to know you can do 14 things. They need to know you can solve one specific type of problem extremely well.

The “2017” problem: You wrote your profile during a specific phase of your career, and it still reflects that phase. You’ve moved on. Your skills have evolved. You’ve led bigger teams, handled harder problems, changed industries or functions. But the profile still reads like it was written by a younger version of you with different priorities. That was me. I’d guess it’s a lot of people reading this right now.

The “corporate voice” problem: Somewhere along the way, we all absorbed this idea that professional means formal, that credibility requires jargon, and that LinkedIn bios should sound like they were written by a consulting firm’s marketing department. So we write things like “leveraging cross-functional capabilities to drive stakeholder value” instead of just saying what we actually do. Nobody talks like that in real life. Why would you write like that in the one place people go to figure out if they want to talk to you?

The “I’ll get to it” problem: This was my biggest issue. I knew the profile was outdated. I knew it didn’t reflect my current reality. But updating a LinkedIn profile feels like a low-priority task compared to actual work, actual projects, actual life. So it sits. For months. Then years. And meanwhile, the outdated version is silently representing you to everyone who searches your name.

 

Personal Branding Isn’t What You Think It Is

Here’s where I want to push back on a phrase that makes most reasonable people cringe: “personal brand.” I get it. The term sounds like influencer culture. It sounds like someone who takes selfies at conferences and writes “thought leader” in their bio without irony. It sounds like something for people who care more about perception than substance.

But strip away the noise, and personal branding is just this: making sure the way people perceive you matches the reality of what you can actually do.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. At least to me. And I am by far any social media influencer.

If you’re good at what you do but your online presence says nothing, you’re leaving it to chance. You’re hoping that the right people will somehow find you, remember you, and know what you’re capable of,despite the fact that you’ve given them almost nothing to work with. I don’t post daily LinkedIn content. I don’t comment on trending topics for visibility. I don’t use hashtags strategically. And I don’t plan to start. That’s not my thing, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of inauthenticity that makes social media unbearable.

But I do want the one page that shows up when someone Googles my name to actually tell the truth about who I am and what I bring. That’s not vanity. That’s basic professional hygiene.

 

The Exercise I’d Recommend

If you haven’t touched your LinkedIn profile in over a year, here’s a simple test. Open it right now on your phone. Read it as if you’re a stranger who has never met you. Ask yourself three questions:

1. Does this sound like a real person, or does it sound like a template?
2. If someone read only this page, would they understand what I actually do and what kind of problems I solve?
3. Is there a single specific result, project, or achievement that proves I’m not just listing skills I think I have?

If the answer to any of those is no, you have some work to do. And the good news is, it’s not hard work. It just requires sitting down for an hour, being honest about what you’ve done that matters, and writing it in language that sounds like you,not like a corporate press release.

You don’t need to become a content creator. You don’t need a social media strategy. You don’t need to post three times a week with carousels and calls-to-action.

You just need one page that’s accurate, current, and clear. For someone like me, who would rather do the work than talk about the work, that’s about the right amount of effort for a platform I’ll never love but have learned to respect.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with me. If this made you think about your own profile, even for a second, then the post did its job. If you found it useful, give it a share or a comment. It helps more people see it, and I genuinely appreciate it.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.