Tips For Creating The Perfect “About Me”
A must have for any serious SLOWLY user
Creating the perfect “About Me” (or 'bio') for your Slowly profile is really important. My friend and penpal -little-ghost had lots of good ideas and wrote some excellent topics on our sub-Reddit for the SLOWLYapp.
While sadly their account at Reddit has been deleted, various important user tips posts they made have been preserved – and I thought they deserved to appear in a Blog format. So, here is the first one.
Tips For Creating The Perfect “About Me”
Guest post by -little-ghost, original on Reddit here.
First things first, I definitely don’t know it all, I’m still learning too, but this is a wonderful community to share ideas to and to try and help others out.🙂
That being said, first tip...
1 – Be the truest version of yourself you can be
This means honesty.
It took a while for me to realize that in life I don’t want to appeal to everyone – I want to appeal to the people who like me for who I really am, so I can relax and be myself.
2 – Discuss who you are
This is a place to discuss your hobbies, interests, values, background, occupation, study… and anything else that comes to mind!
Dig deep into who you are, everybody has interesting and unique aspects to themselves. Even interests you hold that may be common- write about your passion for them. It just means you have more people to share it with.
You have freedom to express yourself however you see fit.
3 – Discuss who you want to be
By that I mean to discuss your future, your plans & aspirations.
Do you plan to travel? Future career? Do you want to learn a new language?
I am sure there are many more questions you can ask yourself here, but the point is to make it personalized. Once you have some of your own questions answered and down pat, ask yourself a few “why?” questions.
For an example, I could say “I wish to learn Spanish one day” or I could say “I wish to learn Spanish as my brother is half Chilean, which has inspired me to do so”.
Don’t do this with everything though, it is nice to have some detail and explanations but you also want your new pen friend to be a little bit curious about you so they'll have something to write back about :)
4 – Who do you want to talk to?
Describe what you hope to expect from your new penpal.
Do you like long or short letters? Are there any personality traits that appeal to you? Deep conversations or a good laugh? Perhaps a bit of both?
You can make this as vague or as detailed as you desire, it just depends on how flexible your preferences are.
5 – Finishing touches…
Add a quote, your favourite song or artist, a light-hearted joke, whatever you see fit. 🙂
You could also add a couple of emojis to catch attention- use visually clear emojis, but don't be too generous. Too many emojis can be distracting and confusing.
Add in line breaks if you haven't already, a wall of text can be harsh on the eyes, especially distracting and slow to read.
6 – Current status
If you’d like, you can use a small portion at the very top of your About Me to indicate something you want to tell your pen friends.
Gone Fishing? Might take a little extra time responding to letters?
As soon as your friend taps on your account to send you another letter, they’ll see this :)
OR reel them in...
If someone has been scrolling through About Me sections for a while, they may be growing tired and impatient.
You could use the first section of your about me to place a small paragraph you find interesting to hook the reader. Think about what you would like if you read an About Me yourself.
Make sure the first paragraph is not 'cut short'
Another suggestion is to use this space to summarize the contents below. Make sure your first paragraph isn't cut short by the “read more” button, you can test this out by previewing your profile.
Here are two examples :
And another..:
An extra note for discussion…
Do you think About Me sections should have a minimum character limit?
Sadly I have seen many astoundingly short About Me's, single sentences – and even single words. This bypasses the filter to only see accounts with an About Me whilst bringing disappointment and wasting time imo, it might make people think twice.
If you have any other ideas about this topic to note, please leave them below! I would love to hear them all.
Hope this helps!!!
And this topic engaged the readership
...getting a lot of replies and activity. Sadly, Reddit locks all threads by default, 6 months after the original post, so adding new comments is impossible after that. 🙄😕
You could visit the original post here, and read some of the responses, which in some cases got incorporated into the final text. 🙂👍
A comment which touched on a number of issues
This one was early on the conversation, and -little-ghost was gracious and accepted the suggestions, incorporating them into the final text.
“You have a point to be considered — that people opening up your profile will be browsing thru the many, many people in the users list. They have been looking at others, maybe many others.
So there's some impatience or fatigue that might kick in. Maybe have a shorter paragraph at the top, which will show even without expanding the whole About me.
If that para looks interesting, hooks the visitor, they might follow on to the next and next.
I haven't seen a mention, but I think a light use of emoji could be helpful – there's no text formatting at all, just plain text, so we need to create some visual breaks and interest.
- Break a paragraph frequently; too long and it's harder to read.
- Organize things in logical, flowing order.
- maybe an emoji, adds colour and flair, here and there.
- Use one that is visually clear, not something obscure that people don't know the meaning.
- Don't use too many, or make it all emojis; many can't read that.
- And even if they do, it's open to confusion sometimes.
Look at your profile. How does the About Me look, before you expand that part?
Ideally the text that shows in the first look should be a complete paragraph, and attractive to a passing user.”
Famous Last Words
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