LinkedIn Premium is LinkedIn’s paid subscription service that provides users with additional features and benefits beyond the free basic account. Premium comes with several useful tools and services that can help boost your professional brand, find new opportunities, and get the most out of the LinkedIn platform.
Enhanced Profile and Visibility
One of the main benefits of LinkedIn Premium is the ability to enhance your profile’s visibility and appearance. With a Premium account, you can see more information about who has viewed your profile. This allows you to better understand how your profile is performing and who is interested in you or your work. Premium also provides analytics about your profile views and search appearances.
In addition, Premium gives you access to profile branding tools that let you display media on your profile, including the ability to add audio and video introductions. This helps your profile stand out and gives it a more dynamic and multimedia feel. You also get expanded profile recommendations based on your experience and interests.
Customized Public Profile URL
Premium enables you to customize the URL for your public profile with a unique handle of your choice. This creates a more professional looking URL that’s easy to share and remember. It also helps establish your personal brand on LinkedIn.
Who’s Viewed Your Profile
One of the most useful Premium features is the ability to see expanded information on who has viewed your profile recently. With the free account, you can only see the last 5 profiles that viewed you but Premium shows you the last 90 days of profile views.
This allows you to identify and target prospective clients, hiring managers, and other important connections who have shown interest. It’s an easy way to see who you should try to connect with or follow up with directly.
Finding New Opportunities
Premium also helps you find new job, business, and career opportunities in several ways.
Open Candidates
The Open Candidates feature lets recruiters know you are interested in and actively seeking new job opportunities. This signals to recruiters and hiring managers that you are open so they can more easily discover and contact you about open roles.
Advanced Search Filters
Premium gives you advanced filters for searching jobs and people on LinkedIn. You can narrow down your searches using a wider range of filters such as years of experience, company size, location radius from a zip code, date posted, and more. This helps you quickly hone in on the best opportunities.
Talent Insights
Premium’s Talent Insights show you how in demand certain skills or experience requirements are. You can see what qualifications are trending up or down for specific jobs and companies. This can help you understand what skills to develop to best match employers’ needs.
Salary Insights
For many job listings, Premium provides estimated or actual salary ranges. This gives you a better sense of the potential compensation when evaluating opportunities to determine if they align with your goals.
Interview Preparation
Premium offers expanded access to interview prep content to get you ready for your next big interview. This includes tips, example questions, and best practices for acing interviews.
Messaging and Relationship Building
Premium also includes some useful upgrades for messaging capabilities and relationship building.
InMail Messages
You get a monthly allowance of InMail messages that let you directly contact anyone on LinkedIn, even if you’re not connected. This makes it easier to reach out to key individuals you want to connect with.
Who’s Viewed Your Profile
As mentioned above, seeing the full list of who has viewed your profile recently enables you to identify relationships and connections to build or strengthen. You can proactively reach out and engage with those who have shown interest.
Introductory Email Recommendations
Premium provides suggested templates and tips for introductory emails when reaching out to new connections. This saves you time crafting effective cold emails and InMails.
News and Content
Premium also unlocks additional news and content features.
Premium Articles and Courses
You get unlimited access to Premium professional development courses and articles. These provide tips and best practices across a range of business and career topics to help you succeed.
Audio/Video Learning
In addition to articles and courses, Premium includes audio and video learning content. This provides learning material in an engaging multimedia format.
Trending News Feed
A customized news feed delivers news stories and content based on your interests and who you follow. This keeps you informed on the latest developments for your profession and industry.
Company Pages Snapshots
Premium provides a snapshot overview of analytics for company pages that you follow or are interested in. This shows you info like the company’s follower growth, post frequency, and follower engagement.
Search Alerts
You can set up search alerts to notify you when new content matching your parameters is posted. For example, you can create alerts when new jobs of interest are listed or when your colleagues and connections post content.
Pricing
LinkedIn Premium is available on a monthly or annual subscription basis. Here are the current pricing options:
| Subscription | Monthly Price | Annual Price |
|---|---|---|
| Premium | $29.99 per month | $359.88 per year (equivalent to $29.99 per month) |
As you can see, choosing the annual subscription can save you about $60 per year compared to paying month-to-month. However, the monthly subscription offers more flexibility if you only need access for a short time.
Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It?
Whether LinkedIn Premium is worth the investment depends on your individual needs and how much you would use the additional features.
For most professionals, especially those actively networking, job seeking, or wanting to build their brand, Premium can provide a lot of value. The enhanced profile visibility and opportunities for connecting with the right people often make the subscription worthwhile.
However, more casual LinkedIn users who just want to maintain a basic profile and only periodically check for new messages or notifications may find the free account sufficient. The more you take advantage of the additional capabilities and benefits, the more worthwhile Premium becomes.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn Premium provides professionals, recruiters, and businesses with additional features to get more out of LinkedIn. Key benefits include increased profile visibility, finding new opportunities through advanced search filters and insights, building relationships with targeted messaging and notifications, and accessing premium news and content.
For around $30 per month, LinkedIn Premium can be a smart investment for those wanting to boost their professional brand, recruiter outreach, and career development. But it may not be necessary for more casual LinkedIn users satisfied with just maintaining a basic profile and connectivity.
