LinkedIn Premium – Is it worth it?
I have been using LinkedIn as my preferred platform for networking, and it is a great tool for making business connections – it gets right in so that people can connect on a business level. But… how is LinkedIn Premium better than LinkedIn? What does it do? And more importantly: Is it worth it?
In this video I have a chat with personal branding expert Andrew Ford from Social Star for his views. Do you need to upgrade to Premium when there are so many good features for free?
‘There’s a job-seeker part of the platform,’ says Andrew, ‘and also people in business development looking for more customers. This means it doesn’t always fit everybody, it really does depend on your circumstances.’
‘With Premium, you’re paying for access to talk to people, and the thing that LinkedIn promotes is “Inmails.” Inmails allow the user to contact anyone on LinkedIn, not just a limited amount or limited scope. It’s the ability to cold-call people’s profiles. For $60, you get five.’
Is LinkedIn Premium worth paying for?
‘Now, my personal opinion is that this is useless. People would buy it to connect to CEOs and other decision-makers, but none of them read Inmails. They just don’t. It gets a 1% open rate, which just annoys people.’
I agree with Andrew on this point – the kind of messages that pop up as an Inmail from someone you don’t know instantly feel like advertising.
‘Yeah. And the thing is that the reason why you feel like that is because that’s what it’s built for, and essentially an inmail is a cold call.’
If you are in high-ticket items and only need 10 clients per year, you don’t need the special features of Premium, because you don’t need all the extra clients.
So how can we improve our LinkedIn experience without Premium?
‘When I want to connect with people, I want to make it as personal as possible – you want to make it seem like it’s not a bot.’
‘Also, instead of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I recommend Hubspot. It’s free, you get 80% of the features and it transfers across platforms.’
When would LinkedIn Premium be of benefit to me?
If you are a jobseeker, standard LinkedIn will let you search only a number of profiles per day. To do proper research on plenty of companies in a short amount of time, you might need more than that, so when you need to look up a lot of profiles to find out more about a lot of companies, or to have your job application easy for them to get to, then LinkedIn Premium would be helpful.
The conclusion: Should I get LinkedIn Premium?
Standard LinkedIn is easily good enough for most purposes and circumstances, especially when coupled with other free services like Hubspot, but you might consider LinkedIn Premium if you happen to be a new job seeker who needs to do research on a lot of companies in a short amount of time. Even then we would not recommend reaching out to too many people in the style of a cold call. Approach friendly, guys!
And if you want to work one-on-one with me on your Personalised LinkedIn Video campaign, book your Video Strategy Session