How to Make your LinkedIn Profile Sing - 360Brew Edition

LinkedIn's algorithm has never been intuitive for users of other social media platforms--from its preference for once-a-day posting to how it values different forms of engagement. This got even more complicated in late 2025, when LinkedIn launched the 360Brew algorithm—a 150-billion parameter language model that reads your content semantically instead of just counting clicks. This new AI-driven recommendation system promises to understand what you write, not just how many people react to it. It also made "good" on LinkedIn even more different than on other social platforms.

This leads me to one of the questions I keep getting: "OK, so what do I actually do to do well on LinkedIn?"

But first, a point worth internalizing: LinkedIn is not a platform about volume of reach. It's a platform about quality of reach—getting your work in front of the specific people who have something professionally relevant to offer you, whether that's a collaborator, a client, a mentor, or someone who will challenge your thinking. A post that reaches 200 of the right people is worth more than one that reaches 20,000 random ones. While I've come to that conclusion based on my experiences, it's also shaped by how LinkedIn has set up their algorithm, which is clearly steering in this direction as well.

This post tries to answer part of that question: how to get your profile right. The algorithm reads your headline, About section, and skills to classify your expertise before it decides who sees your content. If your profile doesn't clearly signal what you know, the best post you've ever written probably still won't find its audience.

The Basics First

Before we get into algorithm optimization, make sure the fundamentals are in place. These aren't 360Brew-specific—they're just what a complete, credible LinkedIn profile requires.

Photo. A recent, professional photo—something taken in the last two years where you look like the person someone would meet on a video call. Not a studio glamour shot, not a cropped conference photo, not something from a decade ago. If you wouldn't use it on a speaker bio, replace it.

Banner image. The default LinkedIn gradient tells visitors you haven't thought about this space. Use something that reinforces your professional context—your organization's branding, an event you spoke at, a visual related to your field. It doesn't need to be designed. It needs to not be the default.

A real description. Your About section should actually exist and say something substantive. A surprising number of profiles leave this blank or have a single sentence from 2018. We'll get into how to optimize it below, but step one is having one at all.

Your work history filled in. Every role should have at least a few sentences describing what you did and what domain you worked in. Blank experience entries are missed opportunities—both for humans scanning your profile and for the algorithm trying to classify you.

Once those are covered, the rest of this post is about making each element work harder under 360Brew.

Your Headline

The headline is the single highest-signal element for classification. 360Brew reads it first when deciding what kind of expert you are.

The principle is simple: state your domain, not your disposition. A language model parsing "Passionate Leader | Change Agent | Coffee Enthusiast" learns almost nothing about your actual expertise. It's the semantic equivalent of static noise.

Compare these:

• Before: "Senior Foreign Service Officer | Diplomat | International Relations Expert"
• After: "U.S. Economic Diplomacy in Southeast Asia | Trade Policy & Commercial Advocacy"
• Before: "Program Manager | Digital Transformation | Change Agent"
• After: "IT Modernization for Civilian Agencies | FITARA Compliance & Cloud Migration Strategy"

The second versions tell a language model exactly what topics this person covers and who they serve. The first versions describe identity and disposition. The second versions describe what the person actually works on.

When I tightened my own headline from general "digital diplomacy" language to specifically "government AI transformation," engagement from federal and defense audiences increased. That was counterintuitive—narrowing felt like limiting. But semantic specificity is how the algorithm matches your content to the right people. You are not limiting your audience. You are helping the system find it.

Your About Section

The About section is where 360Brew looks for your sustained expertise signal. The algorithm weights the beginning of any text more heavily—your first paragraph gets disproportionate attention, just like the opening of a post.

Your first paragraph should name your 2-3 core topics explicitly. Not implied. Not buried in a narrative. Named. If you help organizations adopt AI within federal procurement constraints, say that in sentence one. If you specialize in climate risk modeling for institutional investors, lead with it.

The second paragraph is where you ground that claim in experience—but stated as fact, not as credentialing. "I've spent fifteen years working with cabinet-level agencies on technology adoption" is grounding. "As a recognized thought leader with two decades of award-winning expertise" is a press release.

A useful test: if a smart stranger read only your About section, could they accurately describe your expertise domain in one sentence? If the answer is "they'd know I work in technology, broadly," that's not specific enough. If the answer is "they'd know I help government agencies adopt AI without breaking procurement rules," you're in the right place.

One thing to be careful about: most About sections are chronological career narratives. That format made sense when humans scanned profiles for hiring decisions. A language model classifying your expertise doesn't need your career story. It needs to know what you know and in what context you know it.

Your Featured Section

The Featured section is the most underused classification signal on LinkedIn. Most people either leave it empty or pin whatever post happened to perform well six months ago.

Under 360Brew, every Featured item is an additional data point the algorithm uses to understand your expertise. Pin your 2-3 best posts that represent your core topics. If you have external publications—an article, a framework, a guide—link those. Each item should reinforce the same classification your headline and About section establish.

The corollary: remove anything that dilutes the signal. That conference group photo, the generic company announcement, the post about your marathon—those actively confuse the system about what you're an expert in. Save personal content for posts, where it's clearly contextual. Your Featured section should read like a curated portfolio of your professional knowledge.

Your Skills

Skills are direct semantic inputs for categorization. LinkedIn lets you list up to 50, but only the top 3 are visible on your profile by default—and those three carry the most algorithmic weight.

Reorder your skills so the top 3 match your headline and About section. If your headline says "Federal AI Transformation" but your top skills are "Microsoft Office" and "Team Management," you're sending mixed signals to a language model trying to classify you.

Remove skills that dilute your topic classification. You may genuinely be skilled at project management, but if it's not central to how you want to be classified, it's noise. Skills are labels you're handing the algorithm, not a comprehensive inventory of everything you can do. (It's also unlikely that any human is going to meaningfully read your LinkedIn skills past the first 4-5.)

Endorsements matter here too—not as vanity metrics, but as social proof. An endorsement from someone the algorithm recognizes as being in your domain reinforces the signal. Five endorsements for "AI Strategy" from federal technology leaders are worth more than fifty for "Leadership."

Your Experience Section

Most people treat Experience like a resume: bullet points of responsibilities, quantified achievements, action verbs. That format exists to impress recruiters. Under 360Brew, it serves a different purpose—additional semantic context for expertise classification.

Rewrite role descriptions to emphasize what you know, not what you did. Use the language of your domain: specific frameworks, methodologies, regulations, program names. These are the terms the algorithm uses to build its understanding of your expertise area.

Compare:

• Before: "Led cross-functional team of 15 to deliver $2M technology modernization initiative on time and under budget"
• After: "Designed AI adoption strategy for cabinet-level agency navigating FedRAMP authorization, FISMA compliance, and workforce transition—balancing innovation speed with oversight requirements unique to federal environments"

The first reads as a resume bullet. The second tells a language model exactly what kind of problems this person understands.

The Alignment Test

All of the above has to point in the same direction. If your headline says "government transformation," your About section emphasizes "digital innovation broadly," your Featured pins a vacation photo, and your recent posts are about cryptocurrency—360Brew cannot classify you. And content that can't be classified doesn't get distributed.

The self-audit:

1. Read your headline
2. Read the first paragraph of your About section
3. Look at your top 3 skills
4. Look at your last 5 posts

Do these four elements tell a coherent story about one expertise domain? If someone saw only these four things, would they say the same sentence to describe what you know?

If not, decide which element represents what you actually want to be known for—and align the rest to match it.

One important note about timing: the data suggests it takes about 90 days of aligned signals for 360Brew to fully categorize you. That means this isn't a "make changes and see results tomorrow" situation. You're giving the algorithm a learning period. Weeks 1-4 are the system reading your signals. Weeks 5-8, you should start seeing engagement from more relevant audiences. By weeks 9-12, the categorization is working and each post benefits from the established classification.

The 90 days can feel slow. But the alternative—staying unclassified—means your content continues to reach people more or less randomly, regardless of how good it is.

Do This Today

The profile changes I've described take about 20 minutes. Rewrite your headline for specificity. Restructure your About section so the first paragraph names your topics. Reorder your skills. Curate your Featured section. The 90-day categorization window starts the moment you align your signals.

If you want the full context on what 360Brew changed and why these profile elements matter algorithmically, I wrote about that in detail here. This post was the practical follow-up—what to actually do about it.

The algorithm is finally optimized for substance. Make sure your profile tells it where to find yours.