LinkedIn Premium- Is It Worth It?

One of the biggest questions I get when conducting a webinar or even training a company is “Should I pay for LinkedIn?”? In other words, should you pay for a premium account?

LinkedIn calls their free offering Basic, all other accounts are available as a subscription, either paying a monthly fee or a yearly fee (which is discounted from the monthly fee).

The different types of premium accounts available are:

• Basic (Free)
• Premium Career
• Recruiter Lite
• Premium Business?
• Sales Navigator
• LinkedIn Learning

There are differences between each of these that are explained by LinkedIn on their Help page here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/help/linkedin/answer/a545596

The reason for this article is that in the past, the benefits of a premium membership were, in my opinion, limited.? You had more search results and no search limit as well as what I saw as the top benefit- seeing 90 days of “Who’s Viewed My Profile” as opposed to only your last 5 profile views.

So my advice was always to use the Basic LinkedIn until you’d exhausted it’s capabilities- in other words, when you are unable to find who you’re looking for or have larger numbers of people viewing your profile, consider upgrading.? Of course for those using LinkedIn for sales I always recommended Sales Navigator for its robust search capabilities over the Basic version.

But now, LinkedIn is upping the premium game and adding several features that are only available to premium subscribers.? If you have any level of paid LinkedIn, here are just a few of the features you have that Basic users do not have:

90 days of profile views

InMail credits (between 5 and 30 per month depending on your plan)

Custom button added to your profile

Access to Celebrations on your My Network page

***NEW- Unlimited number of custom notes sent in connection requests- I’ll deal with this in more detail below.

You can do ample research on the benefits of the different premium levels that are available, but I want to highlight three features that are fairly new (one brand new!) that I believe make a premium account worth the cost.

CUSTOM BUTTON

You can now, if you’re a premium member, add a custom button to your profile that will show up next to the blue default button (Connect/Follow for non-connections, Message for connections).

This button can be one of the following:?

• Visit my store
• Visit my website
• View my portfolio
• View my blog
• Book an appointment

The button will link to the URL of your choice and can be edited or deleted at any time.

See the photo below to see an example and click the link at the end of the article to view and download a document showing exactly how to add the feature.

This will also show in the top part of your posts, so it makes a great CTA.

CELEBRATIONS

This feature was rolled out in early 2023 and gives you one place to see connections that are celebrating a birthday, have had job changes or work anniversaries.?

You can find it on your My Network page right under the Invitations section.??

This gives you ‘one stop shopping’ for congratulating your connections on job changes and wishing them well on their birthdays as opposed to having to weed through your notifications to review them.

I review this in more detail in the PDF you can download below.

PERSONAL NOTES WITH CONNECTION REQUESTS

This is a brand new ‘feature’ that Linkedin has recently started rolling out.? There was much ado about this on LinkedIn last week and I wanted to wait for confirmation.??

I happen to know someone with an inside source who agreed to confirm this, but wanted to remain anonymous (think, “A source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous…")

Here’s the quote:?

"Yes, LinkedIn will restrict use of personalized invites to small amount (precise number is TBD but currently experimenting with 5 and 10) for free. If members want more, they need to buy Premium."

Those 5-10 are in a month, by the way. Also, it is said that the notes you are able to send will be limited to 200 characters rather than the standard 300 characters.

Now, this is something to unpack and will have an effect on everyone, whether you’re a premium subscriber or not.? What we’ll see now is an increase in the number of connection requests sent with no note.?

WHAT TO DO?

If you’re a premium subscriber you have to be ready to triage your connection requests. Hopefully you’re already doing this, but if not, consider using a text expander (I use Magical Text Expander, you can preview it HERE) to build out a reply to every connection request with no note where you are unsure of the reason for the connection request. ? I plan on writing more about this next week, so stay tuned, but what you want to think about is how you’re going to triage the influx of connection requests that have no note.

If you’re a Basic LinkedIn user you’re going to have to use your 5-10 notes sparingly so you’ll have to employ a strategy of sending connection requests to those with a high propensity of acceptance with no note.? For those you do send a note to, you’re going to have to be straightforward- 200 characters with spaces doesn’t leave you a lot of room for details. ???? that sentence there is 149 characters with spaces for example.

I think this is a terrible move by LinkedIn and doesn’t facilitate quality connections, but the reality is that we’re at their mercy.? A number of well known trainers on the platform have been posting about it so hopefully there may be a backpedaling on this.? But, this is about revenue and my guess is this move is part of a more strategic growth initiative on their part.? My big wish is that if that is the case, we’ll see more communication about new features and a better customer experience overall for ALL members.? I’m crossing my fingers and hoping here.

If you want to see where these features are and how to access them, as well as some more commentary from me on strategy in using them, click HERE to download a complimentary PDF complete with video tutorials.

If you're a Basic LinkedIn user, please let me know if you’ve seen a restriction on the number of personal notes you can send, I’m interested to see how fast they roll this out!