Why you should care about LinkedIn endorsements

LinkedIn skills’ endorsement is a useful feature to add trust and credibility to your LinkedIn profile. The idea is simple: Add the (professional) skills you want to promote, showcase them on your LinkedIn profile, and let people publicly endorse you for each one separately. 

By showcasing your skills, you’re playing the social media game: A profile with numerous skills and numerous endorsements for each one of those skills will be noticed by the LinkedIn algorithm and given more visibility. It will also give social proof to people browsing your profile. 

It’s easy to lie on one’s LinkedIn skills, but much harder to have 99+ person confirming this lie publicly. Let’s see how you can add skills to your profile, and get endorsed for those.

How to add skills on your LinkedIn profile

Adding skills to your LinkedIn profile is very easy:

  1. Log in to your LinkedIn account
  2. Go to your profile page
  3. Scroll down to the “Skills” section and click on the Add symbol
  4. Input an existing skill name or add a new one
  5. Repeat the process as many times as needed (up to 50 skills)
  6. Save

Here is an animation of how you can add a new skill, in this case “marketing” to your profile:

What’s the optimal number of skills to showcase on your LinkedIn profile ?

LinkedIn allows you to pick up to 50 skills. You have to pick the skills, people can not endorse you for a skill you didn’t add.

Does that mean you should pick 50 skills ? That depends on how advanced your LinkedIn game is. Here is what we recommend: 

Level 1: Beginner. When you get started on LinkedIn, prefer having up to 10 skills. Your early goal is to link your profile to a clear category and specialty. For instance, if you’re a marketer, choose “Marketing” as your primary skill and “SEO”, “Google Analytics”, “Keyword analysis”, “SEO audit”, and “SEO copywriting” as secondary skills. It makes it easy for people browsing your profile to understand what you’re capable of. 

Removing options allows your connections to endorse you for those skills you mentioned, which will in turn push them as your top skills on your main profile page.

Level 2: Professional. If you’re an established professional, showcase it by adding specialized skills. These can be names of the tools you master, subcategories of your primary skills, or other primary skills you master. It will show recruiter you master your topic and add powerful keywords to your profile.

Level 3: Influencer. If you reach influencer status, your profile will have so much traffic that random people in your audience will just endorse you for the topics you talk about. Feel free to add more skills, since you’ll reach the maximum “99+” endorsement badge for most of them. But be careful not to lose focus, favoring quantity to quality.

How to endorse someone on LinkedIn

Endorsing someone on LinkedIn is easy. But before you do,  you must make sure that you are connected to the person you intend on endorsing. If you are connected, do as follow:

  1. Go to your connection’s profile page
  2. Scroll down to the “Skills” section
  3. Click “endorse”, either on the main skills, or on the secondary skills shown in the “More skills” section.

How to get endorsements on LinkedIn

First, the best way to get endorsements on LinkedIn is by asking. Use your network! Ask your university friends, your co-workers -past or present -, friends, clients, etc. Most people will comply, or worst case scenario forget about it more or less instantly.

The best endorsements are those given by LinkedIn users that are also endorsed by many people for those same skills because LinkedIn highlights those.

The second-best way to get endorsements is by endorsing people you worked with yourself. Since they’ll be notified of your endorsement, chances are they’ll reciprocate. They are no limits to how many skills you can endorse, so if you endorse 1000 people, chances are you’ll get your 99+ endorsements in no time.

Automatically endorse people in your LinkedIn network as a growth strategy

At TexAu, we build the tools for professionals to automate the grunt work, so they can focus on building real value. And endorsing 100s of people when building credibility into your LinkedIn profile is time you won’t use to create an inspiring post, witty comment, or building a relationship in the DMs.

Automating your LinkedIn endorsement can get you the 99+ endorsements badge in no time. And it’s done easily with our LinkedIn Auto Endorse automation. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

  1. Create a free TexAu account. Though the trial last 15 days, it’s enough to endorse 1000s of connections.
  2. Connect your LinkedIn account with TexAu.
  3. Select Auto Endorse LinkedIn Profiles.
  4. Specify the profiles you want to endorse.
  5. Launch the automation. You’re done !

By connecting on your behalf to LinkedIn, TexAu’s automation will browse each profile, endorse them for their top skills, and go on to the next one. Simple as that ! 

Depending on the number of profiles you decide to endorse, the automation’s execution time can vary. But since everything happens in the cloud, leaving TexAu.com or shutting down your computer won’t impact your automation.