LinkedIn Premium Review: Services, Price and Is It Worth?

Perhaps you have heard of the name LinkedIn. In this article, I will share information about upgrading LinkedIn Premium subscriptions that could help you “upgrade” yourself and find much better job opportunities.

Update 09/05/2023: LinkedIn Business Premium upgrades 6-month package (currently available).

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social networking site where you can connect with professionals in your field, search for jobs, and advance your career. LinkedIn offers two subscription packages: the free package and the paid package.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are among the largest social media platforms today, with a large user base. Currently, LinkedIn is owned by the technology company Microsoft.

However, unlike most other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a professional social network designed to help people connect for business purposes, share experiences, and search for job opportunities.

Update 16/03/2023: LinkedIn has expanded its AI features to support recruitment advertising and job profiles.

The company is now introducing AI-generated writing suggestions to improve user LinkedIn profiles and assist recruiters in writing job descriptions. Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn’s product director, stated that both are built on advanced GPT models. Specifically, LinkedIn is using GPT-4 for personalized job applications and GPT-3.5 for job descriptions. The company is also focusing more on AI in LinkedIn Learning, including 100 courses on this topic and an additional 20 courses focused explicitly on general AI.

Optimizing profiles with current artificial intelligence is only available for LinkedIn Premium users. AI will automatically analyze and rewrite the general introduction section of job profiles to make them more attractive and appealing to recruiters.

✅ LinkedIn has changed the interface of the account upgrade page. I noticed this a few weeks ago when I supported a friend in upgrading their LinkedIn Premium account.

LinkedIn now provides details about the expiration date of the subscription package used instead of just mentioning it as “Annual” or “Monthly.” Specifically, if you upgrade your package on 06/04/2022, immediately after a successful upgrade, LinkedIn will indicate the subscription package and the expiration date as 06/05/2023. I appreciate this clarity.

LinkedIn offers four main paid subscription packages: LinkedIn Premium Essentials, Premium Pro, Sales Navigator Core, and Recruiter Lite. Subscribing to any of these packages grants you access to over 16,000 courses on LinkedIn Learning.

15 Ways to stand out on LinkedIn

• Create an attractive LinkedIn profile: optimize your headline, cover photo, profile photo, and summary section, and optimize the “Featured Section.”
• Organize the content on your LinkedIn profile with 3 to 6 topics and schedule content, including posts and ideas. Consider industry trends, customer pain points, current news, upcoming events, and holidays for content inspiration.
• Like and share other people’s posts and congratulate them on their success, especially your VIP connections.
• Avoid bragging about yourself in your posts. Instead, focus on being helpful and providing valuable information to the customer at the center.
• Post consistently. While you don’t have to post on LinkedIn every day, it’s recommended not to post more than once a day (as it may impact the performance of both posts and potentially lead to overexposure). Find a regular posting rhythm that works best for you and helps others consistently notice your profile. Remember that quality is more important than quantity in your posts, so never sacrifice the quality of your content to have something to post.
• Repurpose content to reinforce your brand. Instead of reinventing the wheel multiple times when you already have a lot of content in your archive, you can repost that content. Review your analytics to see which posts perform the best. Remember that no one will remember what you posted.
• Join LinkedIn groups. Relevant groups can help you spread valuable content (especially webinars) and create new strategic connections (if you don’t post anything salesy or self-promotional).
• Learn how the LinkedIn algorithm and hashtags work and use them to increase your networking capabilities.
• Post at the right time of day – usually between 7:30 am and 11:00 am, but consider what is most appropriate for your audience.
• Don’t obsess over the number of likes you receive on your posts because many people don’t publicly interact with content for various reasons – the main reason being that they may not want their connections to know what they like on social media (such as their colleagues and bosses). Sometimes, the best-performing articles and posts have the most negligible interaction (likes and comments).
• Respond to all comments to increase the performance of your posts and enhance their “virality.”
• Tell personal stories in your articles. Storytelling helps you stand out in a sea of similar people and makes you more memorable. People want to do business with those they know, like, and trust.
• Create visually appealing and professional images using Canva to make your posts more engaging.
• Organize your posts with short paragraphs and whitespace to encourage others to “stop scrolling.”
• Monitor what your competitors are doing on their LinkedIn profiles and learn from them.

What does LinkedIn Premium offer?

Although LinkedIn is a professional-focused social network, it also has features similar to other social media platforms like Facebook, organized around connecting with friends, posting content, sharing interests, participating in discussions, messaging, having a Fan Page, and joining Groups.

The difference with LinkedIn is that you can create an achievement-based profile, showcase your skills, or create a professional CV.

Many job services nowadays are linked to LinkedIn. Therefore, when applying for a position, you can share your LinkedIn profile with all your achievements, past job positions, reviews from previous companies, colleagues, etc., without filling out a lengthy application form (depending on the company you’re applying to).

LinkedIn Premium Services

The paid subscription package on LinkedIn is called LinkedIn Premium, and it includes several smaller subscription packages.

So, when purchasing LinkedIn Premium, how do you choose the right subscription package?

Let’s review the features of the LinkedIn subscription packages together.

“LinkedIn needs to be clearer in classifying its paid subscription packages, and it frequently changes and customizes them, leading to confusion for many users when choosing a package. This is a drawback of this professional social network.”

CONFUSION IN CLASSIFYING THE SUBSCRIPTION PACKAGES

LinkedIn regularly updates its services. In addition to the positive updates, such as adding more practical courses (as I reviewed in the post about the speed of course updates on LinkedIn Learning), LinkedIn also has updates that confuse users and leave them unsure of which package to choose.

Recently, there have been changes in the subscription packages (depending on your account settings):

With my account (free, current usage) wanting to upgrade to LinkedIn Premium, LinkedIn proposes four subscription packages (see the image below) with the following essential features.

✅ LinkedIn Premium Career (source: LinkedIn.com)

“Get hired and get ahead

Stand out and get in touch with hiring managers

See how you compare to other applicants

Learn new skills to advance your career”

…

✅ LinkedIn Premium Business (source: LinkedIn.com)

“Grow and nurture your network

All Career features, plus:

Find and contact the right people

Promote and grow your business

Learn new skills to enhance your professional brand”

✅ LinkedIn Premium Sales Navigator Core (source: LinkedIn.com)

“Unlock sales opportunities. All Business features, plus:

Find leads and accounts in your target market

Get real-time insights for warm outreach

Build trusted relationships with customers and prospects”

✅LinkedIn Premium Recruiter Lite (source: LinkedIn.com)

“All Business features, plus:

Find great candidates, faster

Contact top talent directly

Build relationships with prospective hires”

But at the same time of access, if you want to upgrade to a premium package, LinkedIn proposes the following 4 subscription packages (notice that the names of the first two subscription packages are different):

As you can see in the two images above (screenshots taken on 15.02.2022), it can be concluded that the current LinkedIn Premium Career subscription package (in February 2022) is equivalent to the LinkedIn Premium Essentials package, and the LinkedIn Premium Business package is identical to the LinkedIn Premium Pro package. (The other packages have unchanged names).

LinkedIn’s current classification of subscription packages makes it difficult for me to advise on paid subscription packages for those who want to use the service.

Which LinkedIn Premium subscription package should you choose?

First, you need to understand your purpose of use because LinkedIn offers several subscription packages.

You can see a quick comparison of LinkedIn subscription packages at the following link:

https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator/comparison-table

Note: The above comparison is a general overview and does not reflect the detailed features of the subscription packages. For example, based on the comparison table, I previously chose the Sales Core package while my needs were met with the LinkedIn Premium Business package.

Advantages of job searching when upgrading to LinkedIn Premium

According to statistics from a 2020 Jobvite report (1), 72% of recruiters are active on LinkedIn, and 67% say LinkedIn has many high-quality candidate profiles.

If you are looking for a job, the free LinkedIn package can help you gain an advantage in securing employment. As I reviewed in other blog posts, most training platforms nowadays have connections to LinkedIn profiles, such as Coursera, Codecademy, DataCamp, etc.

✅ If you want to go even further, the LinkedIn Premium Career package is worth considering because some recruiters believe that a professional LinkedIn Premium candidate is better at job searching.

The LinkedIn Premium Career upgrade package offers many premium features compared to the primary account, including free InMails, profile views mode, additional information about the job you’re seeking, information about candidates in the same industry, and highlighting candidate status.

Furthermore, the LinkedIn Premium Business subscription package is a better choice if you want to combine job searching with business activities (Career and Business).

LinkedIn Premium Career and LinkedIn Premium Business

Prominent features of the LinkedIn Premium Career and LinkedIn Premium Business upgrade packages

LinkedIn Premium Career and LinkedIn Premium Business are two of the premium paid subscription packages offered by LinkedIn, with the following notable features:

👉Note: LinkedIn Premium Business includes all the features of LinkedIn Premium Career and additional premium features for business activities.

✅ Premium profile

This feature allows for a more extensive profile photo and a customizable background image. You can enable this feature in the Settings section as a premium member. The advantage of a more prominent profile photo is that it helps you stand out compared to other job-seeking profiles using the free package. LinkedIn Premium Career also allows you to customize and set up close tracking of new job positions in your professional field or even track recruiters in the industry, helping you quickly “discover potential opportunities.”

✅ InMail

InMail is LinkedIn’s personal messaging system allowing you to communicate with individuals outside your personal LinkedIn network. This is especially useful when you are actively searching for a job. InMail provides a higher response rate compared to traditional email exchanges. This feature is available in the LinkedIn Premium Career account and other premium LinkedIn subscription plans.

With a Premium Career account, you can directly contact potential recruiters through InMail, which is impossible with Basic/Free accounts.

✅ Highlighted candidate status

As a premium member, your job applications are automatically prioritized on free LinkedIn profiles when you apply through Jobs You Might Be Interested In (JYMBII). This is similar to paying to rank higher in search results on platforms like Google.

✅ Full list of profile views

Basic members can only see the last five profile views (the five most recent profiles that viewed yours). When using LinkedIn Premium Career, you can see everyone who has viewed your profile in the past 90 days.

More importantly, you receive information about how those viewers found your profile, allowing you to personalize any potential contacts you may want to make. This also helps you appear prominently in the search results of recruiters.

✅ Access to ten thousand courses on LinkedIn Learning (full), allowing you to learn and earn certifications under your registered name anytime.