Part 2: The LinkedIn Experiment

Premium Accounts

Sales can be tempting. LinkedIn lured me into a premium account with a deep discount for the first month.

Without a monthly contract and instead offering terms that allowed for cancelation anytime within a billing cycle, there really didn’t seem like a good reason to say no. Well, except for the feedback of friends who had also upgraded and found little use for the service.

Curiosity, it’s an expensive habit, ($31 monthly for a Job Seeker Premium Account, $26 for a Business upgrade). Thus, earlier this fall did I upgrade.

Other than letting me see who was looking at my profile – which really just feeds a mixture of vanity and paranoia – all a premium account offered otherwise was a limited number of InMails a month.  The InMail program allows a subscriber to send messages to people outside their network – if the intended recipient allows for such stranger danger (many so-called influencers do not).

There were other features too, but none that really applied to my needs, which were to simply grow an existing network beyond the people I already knew.

Perhaps the limited number of targeted searches are more useful for head hunters, and likewise the featured candidate offering might help some job seekers who do well on those blind applications in a pool of thousands.

All I discovered in this experiment was that criticizing the LinkedIn influencer program on a post by Conan O’Brien will garner more interest in a profile than any paid-for service offering.

This, and the overwhelming majority (90+%) of strangers who look at my profile are men – which might account for the LinkedIn suggestion to use pictures of women in paid ads on the network.

Have you upgraded to a LinkedIn Premium account? How has your experience been? What do you see as the main benefit?