How LinkedIn Paid Memberships Can Help Your Business

LinkedIn Premium accounts are a paid alternative to standard free LinkedIn accounts that offer some additional benefits for businesses and professionals. These features can be very useful and effective if used correctly.

What You Get with a Paid Membership

Basic membership only let you send messages to people you already know. In order to connect with someone outside of your connections, you have to pay to use InMail service. InMail is LinkedIn’s built-in email platform. Each level of paid membership gives you a specific number of InMails per month and it saves money compared to buying each one separately.

Another premium feature is the Profile Organizer. Profile Organizer lets you save and manage profiles. You can organize profiles into folders, add some details and notes of your own and keep track of the changes they make. This feature can be very useful for recruiters who need to keep an eye on potential employees.

LinkedIn basic membership sets a limit on how many profiles you can view. Paid memberships remove that limit so that you can take full advantage of the LinkedIn’s Advanced Search function.

Premium memberships also let you find out more about who is viewing your profile. Basic membership lets you see some of this information, but it’s limited. Upgrading lets you see more viewers and also provides additional statistics on the people viewing your profile.

How to Upgrade to LinkedIn Premium

There are several options for upgrading, and at first it can be a little confusing. There are four distinct types of membership. Each membership type has three levels that offer progressively more features, like more searches per month and more InMails.

There are membership accounts available for:

1. Businesses – Business, Business Plus, and Executive.
2. Recruiters – Talent Basic, Talent Finder, and Talent Pro
3. Job seekers – Job Seeker Basic, Job Seeker, and Job Seeker Plus
4. Sales professionals – Sales Basic, Sales Navigator, and Sales Executive.

Each membership level has its own added features specific to the account type. For example, membership accounts for recruiters let you search for applicants with specific profile information. Job seekers can use additional filters to refine their job searches. Job seeker plans offer a guaranteed response for InMails. This way, InMails that get no response don’t count against your limit.

LinkedIn premium accounts can be beneficial, but aren’t necessary for many LinkedIn users. If you want to explore the full potential of LinkedIn, you can always give premium memberships a test run and cancel later on if it isn’t worth your while. If you’re new to LinkedIn, start out with a free profile and get familiar with the site first. Over time, you might find that these additional features could be very useful for your business.