Just recently LinkedIn, the professionally oriented social media website, launched a new feature. It provides LinkedIn users the opportunity to endorse their LinkedIn connections for skills that the connection has listed on their profile.

You might have gotten an email recently that a LinkedIn connected endorsed you for a specific skill that you listed on your profile and wondered what was going on.

Has that happened to you? Heck, maybe you forgot you even had an account on LinkedIn.

For me, this new feature kind of took me by surprise. So, I was glad that others had already created some blog posts about this feature. One of those people was Lisa Marie Dias, an expert in online marketing.

Check out her post at http://lisamariediasdesigns.com/2012/09/29/endorsements-linkedin-feature/

She writes in her post:

“This recent addition allows visitors to ‘endorse’ or recommend those skills you have included. People CAN endorse skills that you have not listed – there is a way to suggest skills other than the ones included by the owner of the profile – but most people will probably not take the time to do that so be sure you have added as many skills as you can (you are allowed to add up to 50!) in your profile.”

When you go to a person’s profile now, you may be shown a series of skills, each in a box. If you believe the person has all the skills listed, just check the yellow endorse button. Or to select one or more specific skills, just check the x in the box next to the listing of that skill.

In some ways, use of this feature is similar to “liking” a business page on Facebook. However, in this case, you are attesting that you have experience/knowledge about the skills that someone else claims to have.

For another take on this new feature, go to http://ow.ly/e8V7E

There you will find a question and answer piece by Wayne Breitbarth, author of The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success, one of the best books I have read about LinkedIn.

He advises LinkedIn users to continue to solicit recommendations to be posted on LinkedIn, as these are personalized testimonials about work that you have done. However, he goes on to say:

“Since the number of endorsements you receive will probably be used for search ranking, you would be foolish to ignore them, and you already know how much I value recommendations. To learn more about the important but little-known benefits of recommendations, see my blog post LinkedIn Recommendations: The Secrets Revealed.”

If you haven’t gravitated yet to LinkedIn and have focused mainly on Facebook (or maybe Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media sites), I suggest you check out LinkedIn.

Whether you want to develop more professional connections as an employee, business owner, or just someone with a variety of avocations, LinkedIn is a terrific medium for doing that. Just go to www.linkedin.com

Once you get there and set up profile, be sure to ask me to connect with you. You can find me at

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joycefeustel

Especially with LinkedIn adding this new endorsements feature, you can easily have others acknowledge you for your skills in a simple, easy process.

Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers’ Social Media Tutor, helps people relatively new to social media to become more effective and comfortable in their use of this medium. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com