What about LinkedIn Premium Accounts ?

LinkedIn is the most important online network for professional use. If you are a business owner, manager, freelancer or consider yourself a professional in what you do, you SHOULD have a profile on LinkedIn. Today LinkedIn counts over 135 Million members and is still growing by 2 members every second !!!

Most people use the free available tools, which are already a fantastic toolbox to grow your network and keep in touch with your contacts.

In recent financial updates we have read that (paid) Premium Accounts have doubled. People don’t throw away money, so we got interested in the extra available options once you become a Premium member.

What are the available paid subscriptions on LinkedIn ?

In general there are 3 different series of paid accounts :

·         Accounts for Recruiters
·         Accounts for Job seekers
·         Premium Accounts

In total LinkedIn offers 10 different paid accounts, each of them offering a different mix of extra tools to enhance your networking capacities.

I’ll give you a short introduction to the most important tools. I also added links to short video’s for most of these tools. 

Inmail : Send emails to people outside of your network. Inmails are included in some of the paid accounts, but can optionally be bought in all accounts.

http://youtu.be/oqwOJe6Ho70

Openlink Network : When you join the Openlink network as a paying member you allow anyone on LinkedIn to message you free of cost. This makes you reachable for much more people.
http://youtu.be/aS1iA5E4f4o

Advanced searches : In all accounts you get extra search options that help you reach your target audience. You will also get more results compared to searching with a free account.
http://youtu.be/x0ysye1wLks

3th degree and group connections : Normally names outside your second degree are hidden. Paid memberships all get to see at least the first name of these contacts.

Who has viewed my profile : Instead of the last 5 people you get the complete list. This was actually the single reason why I upgraded my account. This complete list together with the extended statistics on the same page make a very valuable tool to measure your networking efforts on LinkedIn.
http://youtu.be/SYVU_0jJwPs

Profile Organiser : This is a very useful rolodex tool to keep your most important contacts close at hand. Bookmark profiles for later use and add notes about this person.
http://youtu.be/lYKbu5X00bs

Priority Customer Service : All paying members get priority customer service.

Full overview of tools and features of all 10 paid LinkedIn accounts

A.      Accounts for Recruiters

B.      Accounts for Jobseekers

C.      Premium Accounts

If you are not a recruiter or jobseeker, the Premium Accounts will be the most interesting and offer a range of very useful tools to enhance your networking efforts.

There is a little catch to this overview, when you click on the upgrade buttons on LinkedIn you will usually find options to upgrade to Business, Business Plus and Executive. You will have to do some extra effort to discover the cheaper option to upgrade to Personal Plus. In this video you will find a possible solution for this, I have also found other ways.