LinkedIn Endorsements are like the giving and receiving of a “thumbs up”. When you get a thumbs up from someone it usually means that “all is good”. But many are asking how this virtual thumbs up can benefit them.
Let’s look at both sides: the person giving the endorsement and the person receiving it.
Giving LinkedIn Endorsements can benefit you by:
- Allowing you a simple way to reach out to a connection. When you endorse them, they will receive a notification that you did so. This in turn may encourage them to click through to your profile and reciprocate with an endorsement of your skills.
- Giving you a broader social presence. When your endorsement is accepted by the recipient, your profile image will appear next to the endorsed skill(s) on their profile. So now, everyone looking at their profile, can see your image as well.
- Providing a quick and easy way to give a mini-recommendation. Endorsements take much less time to give than a full recommendation. However, be aware that to some, they also mean less than what someone takes the time to write out.
Receiving LinkedIn Endorsements can benefit you by:
- Showcasing your skills that others hold in high regard. The more endorsements you receive for a particular skill, the higher that skill will be listed on your profile.
- Promoting the fact that someone endorsed you. When you receive an endorsement, that activity will be added to the update stream for others in your network to see. This could mean others looking for that same skill may click over to your profile to learn more about you and the work you’ve done.
- Showing that you don’t live or work in a vacuum. In order to get endorsements, you must have LinkedIn connections and theoretically, you should know others well enough before making them part of your network.
Endorsements can be a fun tool to use on LinkedIn, however, there are a few downsides to the way LinkedIn has set up the endorsement function and how others are using them. We’ll discuss these in our next post.
Photo credit to Dwayne Bent via Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License.