How to write a social media bio for a small business
Your bio is read by people at the exact moment they are deciding whether to bother with you. Somebody saw a post, tapped your name, and is now giving you a few seconds. It is the highest-intent text you own, and most small businesses fill it with adjectives.
The job it has to do
Three things, in this order: what you do, where you do it, what to do next. Anything that is not one of those three is competing with the things that are.
The test is blunt. Show it to someone who has never heard of you and ask what the business does and whether they could use it. If they hesitate, the bio has failed, no matter how nicely it reads.
Line one: what you actually do
In the words a customer would use, not the words your industry uses. "Bathroom fitting and tiling" beats "bespoke sanitaryware installation solutions". Plain is not unambitious — plain is findable, because search inside these platforms reads your bio, and nobody searches for what your sector calls itself.
If you do several things, lead with the one you most want more of. A bio listing eleven services reads as a business with no speciality, and it buries the one you actually want.
Line two: where, specifically
The single most skipped line, and for a local business the most valuable one. "Leeds and 20 miles" answers the question that stops most enquiries before they start — whether you cover them.
Use the place names people say rather than the administrative ones. Nobody thinks of themselves as living in a borough.
Line three: the reason to pick you
One line, and it has to be a fact rather than a feeling. "Family run since 1998", "usually same-week appointments", "gas safe registered", "everything made here". Facts are checkable and they differentiate. "Passionate about quality" is true of every business that has ever written a bio, which makes it worth nothing.
If you cannot think of one, use the thing customers say about you most often when they are pleased. That is the line.
Line four: what to do next
Tell them. "Message for a quote", "book below", "call for a same-day slot". A bio that describes a business without giving an instruction leaves people to work out their own next step, and a proportion of them will not.
What to delete
- Adjective stacks. Professional, reliable, friendly, trusted. Nobody advertises being unreliable, so these carry no information.
- Emoji as bullet points, beyond one or two. A wall of icons is harder to read than a sentence, and it looks the same as every other bio.
- Hashtags in the bio. They do nothing there but use up characters.
- Awards nobody has heard of, unless the awarding body means something to a customer.
- "DM for enquiries" without a link, when a link would have been faster for everyone.
The link
Most businesses send the single link they get to their homepage, where the visitor has to find what they came for. Send it to the specific thing the bio just promised instead — the booking page, the menu, the price list, the enquiry form.
If you genuinely need several destinations, a simple page with three or four clear buttons works. Whatever it points at, check it opens correctly on a phone. Almost everyone tapping it is on one, and a link that lands on something slow or broken wastes the whole chain of work that got them there.
Two things people forget
Your name field is searchable. On several platforms the display name is indexed separately from the handle, so "Hartley Electrical · Sheffield" is more findable than "Hartley Electrical". It is one of the few free wins left.
The profile photo is part of the bio. At the size it is displayed, a detailed logo is a smudge. Use something legible at the size of a thumbnail — a clear mark, or a face.
How Soclo approaches it
What goes in a bio is the same material the Brand Kit holds — what you do, where you work, your real offers and the things customers ask. Setting it once means it is available everywhere rather than retyped per platform.
Read the Brand Kit guide →The bottom line
What you do, where, one checkable fact, one instruction — in plain words, with a link that goes to the thing you just promised. It takes ten minutes, it is read by exactly the people who are already interested, and most competitors have not bothered. For the same principle applied to a site, see what a small business website should include.