Don't pay to send a message to a LinkedIn member if you don't have to...

NOTE: Updated as of June 4, 2020

You can send a message to another LinkedIn member in several ways. Many do not cost money.

Whether sending a message is possible and what it will cost depend on your degree of connection and whether either of you has a Premium account, among other factors.

If you and the other person are 1st-degree connections, you have unlimited free messaging through LinkedIn. Unless your connection has elected to hide his or her email address from all connections, you also can see the person's email address in the contact information on the profile, so you have that avenue as well. [Italics indicate update 6-4-2020.]

If the other person shows an email address in his or her profile, such as in the About section or the background image, you can go the email route whether you are connected on LinkedIn or not.

If you and the other person "B" are 2nd-level connections, pick the closest 1st-level connection "A" that you share and ask "A" to forward your message to "B." But first, check below for other ways to send it directly.

If you and the other person are members of the same LinkedIn Group, you can send a message through the group. There is a limit to doing this, which I believe is 15 messages per month distributed across all groups to which you belong. You could join a group to which the other person belongs if you needed to.

If you have a Premium membership, you have some number of InMail messages that you are allowed to send per month. For example, the Career Premium level is awarded five InMail credits every month. You can learn more in the Help pages.

If the other person has a Premium membership, he or she might have a feature turned on called Open Profile Messaging that allows anyone to send them an InMail without charge. You will not know if a Premium member has the feature "on" until you try to send an InMail and find a message editing panel. If you see a page from LinkedIn urging you to upgrade your account, then the other party does not have the feature turned on.

If the other person lists a website in their profile, look for a Contact Us link where you can send an email, or go browsing through any personal web page the person may have.

If the other person has any rich content posted to the profile, such as a resume, browse it looking for an email address.

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If you think of another way to exchange messages with fellow LinkedIn members, please let us all know in the comments!

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