Is LinkedIn Premium worthwhile Part 1

So I am day 6 of having LinkedIn Premium and have just attended the webinar that you are offered as part of the membership.

The webinar was good and is worthwhile as a refresher of the uses that LinkedIn has. I do however, still fail to see what we are paying ￡49.99 pcm for! This was one of the early slides and I am left feeling 'so what' about what you get for the Premium version...

Apparently you will get 6x more profile views, 3x more connection requests and 2x faster hiring time (if you are looking for a job).

I have had it a week now and you can see there is no increase...however a week isn't long enough to review, hence why this is part 1 of a review.

InMmail - for me at the moment this is the only real value I can see from premium! I learnt today that you get the InMail credited back if the person you InMail replies to you....who knew? However if they do not reply that is costing you ￡3.33 per message...

Unlimited profile views, connection requests - if you are a really active user of LinkedIn this may well benefit you.

Insights - as a premium member you get access to company insights - I havent yet played around with this so am not sure of the value. Again I will update in the next report.

Pro Finder - now this looks really interesting, but, typically it is not for outside of the US right now. I have asked why and again will update when I know more.

So, in conclusion, my thoughts right now are that having LinkedIn premium would be useful for my clients who decide to focus on LinkedIn as I think that by having the tutorial, the extra access and the fact that it is costing them money would make them more likely to use the platform correctly and therefore get more value. I do not however think they would need it for more than a month! This would also be advice that I give to those who I train on the platform. As I said at the beginning a week is not a long enough trial so I am looking forward to providing an update at the end of my months experiment.

Also, next week David Gilroy and I are going to do some testing to try and understand, why some posts get more views, whether sharing external links does restrict its exposure, and how to generally, be more successful in posting - watch this space!