Informed 471

Postbag.

Is Premium worth it?

I joined in May 2021, paying £399.90+VAT. That’s £479.88 per year or ~£1.31 per day. Here’s what you get on Premium Business:

• Unlimited People browsing and searching
• Who viewed your profile over 90 days
• 15 InMails per month
• Custom CTA button
• LinkedIn Learning
• Open Profile
• Rotating banner
• Feature content at top of profile
• Enhanced Services panel
• AI features
• Gold badge
• Perks, currently including 3 months of free YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium

You might get a discount to stay when trying to cancel Premium, but I’m not offered that.

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LinkedIn now has 100 million verified members, and Zoom will soon show your LinkedIn verification badge.

Some interesting videos to check out on YouTube:

• Rory Sutherland Behavioural Science & Marketing Q&A ~1h
• Algorithmic bias discussion ~1h 30m
• Lynnaire Johnston and Mark Williams ~1h 10m

UpLift Live 26 free ticket prize draw – ENTER NOW

Come to the LaunchPad call on Thursday 8 January 2026 at 11am GMT where the winners will be announced live!

Full transcript.

Is LinkedIn Premium worth it? That’s the main topic of this week’s show. It’s episode 471 of the Informed podcast. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast. Let’s get straight into the show with this week’s questions in the Postbag.

OK, the first question comes to us from Espresso+ member Christopher Johnson, and he’s asked his question in the form of a voice note. So, let’s hear from Christopher right now.

Greetings, John. Question for the podcast: on your own LinkedIn profile, once you go into edit up at the top there’s a section where you can enter your industry or industry group. How to how does that affect where you’re seen and how does that affect what you see? Thanks.

Such a great voice, Christopher. I think I might have to ask you to send me a voice note every week.

OK, let’s get into it. So, yes, if you go into your LinkedIn profile and you tap the second pen icon down from the top, that lets you edit your top card, and in there one of the options is a field that says Industry. Now, mine is set to “Marketing Services” and it has been for several years now.

Next to that field there is a pointer to a LinkedIn help file and that talks about industry options. And LinkedIn says: choose the industry that best matches your company or the type of work that you do. When you add an industry, other people can more easily find your profile or page. When searching for someone in your industry, adding an industry also helps connect you to relevant opportunities, connections and content.

Nothing really surprising there.

Now, that page was last updated more than a year ago, so it’s possible that things have changed since the introduction of the 360Brew algorithm earlier in the year, but the idea is that you’re signaling to LinkedIn what type of industry you work in, and therefore you’re more likely to be found in searches from people who are looking for your type of skill set, and also you’re more likely to see content that aligns with your interests in the LinkedIn feed.

How tightly tied that field is to what you actually experience? It’s very, very hard to say unless you did lots and lots of testing.

But what is sure is that there’s no point trying to game this, you know, trying to set an industry that doesn’t in any way relate to what you do on a day to day basis. When I started out on LinkedIn, I had my industry set to “Technology, Information and Internet”. That’s when I was a technical copywriter. I’ve since switched to “Marketing Services”. I guess in your case, Christopher, given your line of work, then “Events Services” would be sensible.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that selecting one versus another will get you any greater visibility. Just choose something that feels right. I think “Events Services” is probably right for you.

And this isn’t like the skills fields on LinkedIn where you can just make up your own industry. You’ve got to select something from the dropdown menu that comes up when you start typing in an industry.

One thing it’s worth keeping in mind is that sometimes these values do change over time, so it might be worth every now and then coming back into your top card, looking in the industry dropdown and redescribing your industry in case a new category has appeared in the field.

OK, the other question for this week’s Postbag comes from LB Brittingham, who asks: I’m searching for other experts supporting introverts and I keep coming across profiles with “introvert living in an industry of extroverts” or similar. Many seem like real accounts. Maybe it’s some sort of LinkedIn insider knowledge or a meme? Kind of like newbies to Threads who don’t understand the rage bait from fake accounts when they first get there. I’m wondering if the same thing happens on LinkedIn?

I’d probably have to look at the accounts in detail to see whether I thought that they were fake, but it’s certainly the case that a lot of headlines get repeated. Little snippets of phrases become popular. People look at accounts that are doing well and think, yes, I could just steal that phrase and use it as my own. My own “relentlessly helpful” phrase has been used on a number of profiles in the past, so that alone doesn’t necessarily mean that an account is fake.

Of course, if you look at an account and you look at its About statement, if it has one, or if you look at its activity and it looks like it’s reposting dodgy stuff, sometimes you get a feel that this is not a real person and if you do get that feeling, then the more button on that person’s profile will give you a chance to report them and also block them if you wish.

Now, LinkedIn does release a community report a couple of times a year. The latest one of those covers the period of January to June 2025, and they say that they’ve actually stopped 61.2 million fake accounts at registration, and a further 22.2 million were restricted by LinkedIn proactively before any reports were needed by members, whereas only 385,900 accounts were restricted following member reports. So, that should put into scale the kind of, you know, the fact that LinkedIn are catching a lot of these fake accounts.

That’s if you believe these numbers, of course. I’m not entirely sure that I do, but if there were 385,900 reports of fake accounts, that’s a lot of accounts on LinkedIn posting all the time. So, yes, if you see anything like that you think is fake, you use the More button and report it.

OK, main topic for this week is about LinkedIn Premium and whether it is worth it. Now, as a LinkedIn trainer myself, I decided that I was going to take up LinkedIn Premium back in May 2021. At that time I joined for £399.90 plus VAT, which takes it to £479.88 and that works out at £1.31 a day for me. In the UK they have a grandfather pricing model, so whatever price you come in at, you will stay on that price forever.

So, for me it probably is worth paying £1.31 a day for access to LinkedIn Premium Business, but for the average user it probably isn’t.

Let’s quickly go over the features that you get if you do sign up for LinkedIn Premium.

So, Premium gives you unlimited people browsing and searching. So, if you’re on a free account you will notice that you can’t just go and look at profiles files endlessly and you certainly can’t use very many searches to find people. So, that unlimited browsing is really useful if you’re searching for targets and possible leads.

You also get to see who viewed your profile over a 90-day period. So, that can be useful if you want to have a kind of conversation starter to see someone has looked at me first, I’ve got a chance to go and open the door to a connection with that person.

Premium also gives you InMails, so that’s the ability to send a message to someone who you’re not directly connected with, and on Premium Business you can do that up to 15 times per month. And every time you send one of those InMails and someone else responds, you get one of those credits back. So, actually you might be able to send lots more than 15 per month.

You get a custom call to action button that sits at the top of your profile, so you can use that to point people towards, you know, booking a conversation with you or subscribing to a blog and so forth. You also get access to the LinkedIn Learning database, which is a whole heap of learning content in video form. So, you can learn about pretty much any topic that’s out there.

You also get the Open Profile feature, which is turned on by default, I believe, and it means that anyone who is not connected with you can go to your profile and message you completely for free without having to use one of their own InMail credits if they have them, or to even connect with you, they can just message you straight away. So, that’s quite useful. I’ve had that turned on since the beginning.

What else? Well, you get the rotating banner. So, instead of just a single static image at the top of your profile, you can add up to 5 I think it is images that rotate in a sort of carousel at the top of your profile. I don’t find that one particularly useful, but there it is. That’s a Premium feature.

You can also feature content from your profile at the top of your profile. So, things like recommendations for example, to give them added visibility. And there’s enhanced visuals for the Services panel, although I don’t really recommend anyone uses that, I don’t find that of much use. But if you do have a Services page, you can kind of feature that a bit more prominently at the top of your profile.

LinkedIn is trying to put AI-based features into everything and you get more access to that if you’re on a Premium profile.

You get the wonder of having a gold patch next to your name. You can turn that off if you want, but I suppose it shows that you’re at least serious about LinkedIn if you’re paying for it.

And you get some perks by being a Premium member. And these change from time to time. So, if you go to your Me menu, go down to your Premium features, you’ll see on that page all of the things you get being a Premium member. And one of those things is the perks.

And at the moment, the two recent things that they’ve added to that, at least for me, is that you can get a YouTube Premium subscription for 3 months and you can get a Spotify Premium subscription for 3 months. If you are on Premium and you go and take a look at your features, you’ll probably find that they’re different to what I’ve just listed. I’ve got about 9 offers at the moment and they do change from time to time. So, it’s worth taking a look at those things in case you, you find some value.

But is all of that stuff worth paying something close to £500 or more per year for? You have to decide on that. I’ve said several times before that there are a lot of things you can do on LinkedIn completely for free. You know, optimising your profile, writing good content, leaving good comments, writing good DMs and other things as well. All of those things are available for free.

So, if you’re not already maximising your LinkedIn experience from the free version of LinkedIn, you’re not going to get some kind of magic bullet to more visibility or more clients just because you pay for a gold badge.

If you’re at the limit of what you can do with the free version, then I would argue that probably LinkedIn Premium Business is a good investment, but for the majority of users it probably isn’t.

One other thing, I’ve seen a few people posting about this recently, which is that they’ve gone to cancel their LinkedIn Premium and have been offered a discounted rate. Now, whenever I’ve tried this, and I tried it just today just before recording this, that didn’t happen for me.

So, I went to cancel my LinkedIn Premium just to see what discount they’d offer me for staying and it was just kind of OK, are you sure? And you’ll lose all your benefits if you cancel. So, there wasn’t any offer to me.

So, you might possibly want to take a look at that if you got Premium just to see whether they offer you anything.

As I say, as a LinkedIn trainer, it’s probably useful for me to have a gold badge, but for the majority of people, it probably isn’t, in which case you can save your money and do something more useful with it.

OK, that’s the main topic done. This week LinkedIn announced that they have finally reached 100 million verified members on the platform.

Verification launched in 2023 and I believe that their target for the first year was to reach 100 million. So, they’ve only just reached it after about 2 years of the verification process being around. There’s still a lot of debate about whether it’s a good idea to verify or not, and maybe I’ll cover that again on another episode.

But more than 100 million members verified and one interesting addition to that news that they shared this week is that they’re broadening their partnering with other applications so that those other applications can use your LinkedIn verification status and show it in their apps. So, the most prominent one of those now is Zoom. So, I don’t think it’s rolled out just yet but eventually when you’re on a Zoom call, that Zoom call will be able to show you which of the people on the call have a LinkedIn verification. It’s possible that that might increase the uptake of verification because it’s nice to have a blue badge, I guess. So, look out for that one.

There are a few bits of content I want to point you towards. If you’ve got the time to consume them, I think you might find them quite interesting.

The first of those was a Marketing Meetup video interview with Rory Sutherland, who’s a marketing and ads expert and he was doing a Q&A and there’s a lot of really interesting content in there. It’s an hour, it’s on YouTube. I’m going to link to this in the show notes and the transcript that accompany the show, but I find it really insightful and I’ve consumed a lot of this content over the years. This one stood out as a really excellent one. So, check that one out if you’re interested in marketing psychology.

This week also there was a Zoom call that was about an hour and a half about the algorithmic gender bias discussion with lots of the prominent names who’ve been talking about this over the past couple of months. So, I listened in on that one. That’s now available on YouTube, so I’ll point to that one as well. Certainly well worth a look.

And the other one is also on YouTube now and it’s the interview that I think I mentioned last week between Lynnaire Johnston and Mark Williams, the former host of the show, just talking about his experience on LinkedIn and why he started the show and so forth. So, if you want a bit of background, that’s an hour and 10 minutes also worth checking out.

Last item for this week is that we are running a free ticket prize draw for the UpLift Live 26 conference. So, if you want to be in with a chance of winning a free ticket to the in person event in Birmingham on 26 March 2026, then follow the link that’s in the show notes that points towards the free prize draw entry. There are a load of second prizes as well, books and so forth, so plenty of opportunity to win something useful.

If you’ve already got a ticket, you can’t win your freebie ticket back, but you could always nominate someone else to take a free ticket and join you at the conference. And by all means, you know, just tell a friend to come and have a go. It’s a free spin of the wheel.

We are going to be doing the prize draw actually at our next LaunchPad call, which is the Zoom call that we do to let attendees kind of get to know each other before the main event. So, our next LaunchPad call is on Thursday 8 January 2026 at 11am UK time.

So, on that call live we’ll do the spinning of the wheel and work out who are winners of the first and the other prizes. So, come along to that call. It’s open to everyone. It’ll be a lovely little half an hour to get to know people and see who’s going to win the prizes.

OK, that will do for now. As usual, if you’ve got any questions for the Postbag, please drop me a line. And if you’re cool like Christopher, send me a voice note and I’ll include it in next week’s show. And until then, I’ll see you soon.