LinkedIn Premium review

This is a completely rewritten update to a blog I wrote in 2021: see original

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Every time I run a LinkedIn training session, someone always asks whether it’s worth upgrading to a Premium account.

To summarise what I said about this at UpLift Live 24:

You can do all this stuff on a free LinkedIn account.

Many aspects of your LinkedIn presence have nothing to do with paying for a subscription.

You could do all of the following perfectly well right now with dedication, practice and perhaps a bit of guidance (I offer consultations if you need some help):

• Write a good headline
• Write a good About statement
• Create a compelling banner image
• Compose a good profile photo
• Write interesting and relevant posts
• Add thoughtful comments to others’ posts
• Look for opportunities to introduce nice people
• Keep in touch via direct messages
• Send relatable voice notes and videos

How well are you doing the above right now? Would paying for a gold Premium badge make you any more effective?
(Hint: no, it wouldn’t.)

If you feel you’re at the limits of what you can do with your LinkedIn account, and you’re already doing a lot or all of the above, perhaps a Premium upgrade would be worth it. In that case, here’s what you get for your money.

I’m focusing here on the more expensive Premium Business account but you can also get some of the following with the cheaper Premium Career account.

• Premium custom button
• Unlimited search
• Personalised invitations
• Who viewed your profile?
• Private browsing
• Open Profile
• InMail to message non-connections
• Away message
• AI features to draft posts and headlines
• Rotating banner
• Personal post boosting
• LinkedIn Learning
• Premium perks page
• Gold badge
• Premium LinkedIn Live events
• Premium Business vs Premium Career
• Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?

Premium custom button.

Premium Business accounts have the option to add a call to action button in the top card of the LinkedIn profile, which points to an external resource of your choosing, such as a website, email signup page or consultation booking form.

At the time of writing, my custom button is labelled “Book a consultation” and points to my Calendly booking page.

This button also appears in other screens, such as on your posts, in your DMs, and in search results.

Few people click my custom button – at least, it doesn’t seem to lead to more bookings than I was getting before – but it’s good to give them an extra option.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 ⬜️

Unlimited search.

Free accounts have a limit on the number of searches you can do but Premium Business and Premium Career accounts don’t have such limits.

This is probably one of the key features that leads free users to upgrade, and could be especially useful if you’re in a particularly busy period of using the platform to find new work or otherwise build your network in a targeted way.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩

Personalised invitations.

In late 2024, LinkedIn reduced the number of personalised invitations that free accounts could send to just 5 per month. They also reduced the number of characters in those personalised invitations from 300 to 200.

These changes make it harder to do good human networking, but it’s clear this was a route to prompt more people to upgrade to Premium Business.

Premium Business accounts can send personalised invitations as normal, with up to 300 characters per message.

There’s no official upper limit to the number of invitations Premium Business users can send, but you’d be well advised not to send more than about 100 invitations per week to prospective connections.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 ⬜️

Who viewed your profile?

Premium users get to see 90 days of history for everyone looking at their profile, apart from those using private browsing mode.

You can also filter the profile viewers based on categories LinkedIn deems as “interesting viewers”. Thanks to Espresso+ member Graham Rae for the reminder that these search filters exist.

This screen and its search filters could be useful if you’re the type of person who wants to make connections with those who’ve already checked out your profile. Some people find it a bit awkward to make an approach on this basis (“hey, I saw you were looking at me, so …”). I don’t use this method myself.

Jobseekers in particular may benefit from being able to see who’s been looking at their profile. As I don’t use the feature myself, I can’t rate it highly – but it might be valuable for some.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️

Private browsing.

Private browsing means you can look at other people’s profiles without them being able to see that you did. This isn’t quite as useful as it used to be, because …

In December 2024, free accounts changed so that anyone looking at their Who viewed your profile page wouldn’t be able to see the names of any of their profile viewers. This makes the WVYP screen all but useless to free account users.

If you have a Premium account, you won’t be able to see the details of anyone who was browsing your profile in private mode.

So, if a free account user was in private browsing mode and looked at the profile of a Premium user, that Premium user wouldn’t be able to see the free account user’s details.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️

Open Profile.

Open Profile is on by default and means that anyone on LinkedIn can message you.

If you’d like to receive DMs from potential clients who aren’t yet connections, and you don’t want them to waste an InMail contacting you, the Open Profile feature is useful.

I welcome non-craptacular DMs from people I’m not connected with, and I have Open Profile enabled on my profile. Feel free to send me a message referencing this piece.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️

InMail to message non-connections.

InMails are DMs that you send to people you’re not connected with. I rarely use InMails, preferring instead to DM with people I’ve first connected with.

On Premium Career, you can send 5 InMails per month; on Premium Business, you can send 15 InMails per month.

InMail credits roll over for a maximum of 3 months, so Premium Career users can get up to 15 InMail credits, and Premium Business users can get up to 45 InMail credits.

Note that if you send an InMail to someone and they don’t respond, you can’t send a follow-up InMail to that person.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️

Away message.

Premium Business users can set an away message in the direct messages, which acts like out of office replies on emails.

You can set a date range for the message to apply and then enter the text you wish to respond with when someone sends you a DM.

Annoyingly, this away message is sent back only to your 1st connections rather than to anyone who messages you.

Many people use the feature to send a marketing message to connections who DM them (see some away message examples I shared in 2021) I’ve tried that but now use it only when I’m actually away.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 🟩️ ⬜️ ⬜️

AI features to draft posts and headlines.

LinkedIn are putting AI into every corner of the platform, but its AI that drafts posts and rewrites headlines really isn’t very good as of late 2024. Perhaps it’ll improve but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Want to improve your writing on LinkedIn? Get to the point and make your posts interesting, relevant and helpful. Easier said than done, I know.

My rating for this feature:
⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️
(Literally zero – I wish LinkedIn would dump this)

Rotating banner.

Premium Business members can add up to 5 banner images in the top card of the profile. These banners cycle every few seconds, producing a simple slideshow of images.

This can be useful for grabbing the viewer’s attention, but it will lose its appeal if a lot of Premium Business users go down this route.

At the time of writing, I can see the rotating banner on other people’s profiles but am unable to add my own.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜

Personal post boosting.

Premium Business users can boost the visibility of individual personal posts without needing to use a company page or LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager tool.

Ads on LinkedIn tend to be quite expensive, and the experts I’ve spoken to suggest that personal post boosting isn’t likely to be effective.

Only time will tell whether boosted personal posts will work. My concern is that they will clog up even more of the feed than we already tolerate with the existing stream of sponsored/ad content.

There might come a point where the home feed feels like a neverending ad, and if that puts people off spending time on LinkedIn, that’s not going to end well for the organisation.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜

LinkedIn Learning.

Premium Career and Premium Business users get access to LinkedIn’s video library of thousands of training courses on all manner of topics.

I’ve found the quality of the content variable and rarely any better than what’s already available for free on YouTube – but some people get a lot of value from LinkedIn Learning.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜
(I told you it was subjective.)

Premium perks page.

Most people don’t know this but Premium Business users get access to a range of perks that change from time to time: see perks.

Here’s a sample of what’s been on offer, but note that these deals change often so there’s no guarantee that any of this will be available to you if and when you decide to upgrade to Premium Business:

• 3 months of Super Duolingo
• 3 months of Name.com
• 3 months of Spotify Premium
• 4 months of Calm
• 3 months of Microsoft 365 Personal
• 4 therapy sessions with BetterHelp

Most perks haven’t appealed to me, but I did get access to a 1-year Pro subscription of Perplexity, which is a well-regarded AI tool.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 🟩 🟩️ ⬜️ ⬜

Gold badge.

All Premium accounts are accompanied by a gold badge that appears on your profile and on some other screens.

You can hide the display of your gold badge if you wish.

This is one of the least useful of LinkedIn’s Premium features, though you might be amused to hear that this is indirectly the reason for me having a Premium account at all.

While on a Zoom training call with a number of employees of a client of mine, I listened to a couple of those employees questioning whether they should trust my LinkedIn knowledge, as I was a trainer with no gold LinkedIn badge(!)

It was a good lesson in psychology, and I realised that not having a Premium account might prevent me from working with other clients who mistakenly saw the gold badge as something more than it really is.

I have no doubt that many good trainers don’t have a gold badge and that many terrible trainers do. Still, optics matter to some, and that alone is enough for me to justify paying for a subscription. But that’s just me, and I’m here as a LinkedIn trainer and consultant – your circumstances may be completely different.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜

Premium LinkedIn Live events.

LinkedIn sometimes run live video events that require registration and that are open only to Premium Business users.

For example, here’s a LinkedIn content webinar from 4 December 2024: Create LinkedIn posts that get you noticed.

You’ll be prompted to upgrade to Premium Business if you try to access an event like this via a free LinkedIn account.

My rating for this feature:
🟩 ⬜ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜

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Premium Business vs Premium Career.

Premium Business has more features than Premium Career, and is the version that LinkedIn tries to promote in most cases. If you want some of the benefits without all of the cost, Premium Career might work for you.

In any case, I’d always recommend taking a free trial before committing to paying for a LinkedIn account. You can always get a one-month trial, and LinkedIn occasionally offers two months free.

How much does LinkedIn Premium cost?

There’s no simple answer because LinkedIn charges based on grandfather pricing.

This means that when you subscribe, you can keep paying the same price indefinitely. It’s a way of improving customer loyalty, as people who’ve been on Premium for years will be getting a much better price than those who are joining today.

I upgraded to LinkedIn Business Premium in April 2021 on an annual subscription, and my yearly payment is £399.90+VAT, which currently works out at £479.88.

Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?

For me, yes – but I’m an independent LinkedIn trainer, and it would be odd if at this stage I were still swimming around LinkedIn with only a free account. But my situation very likely won’t match yours.

There’s no single killer feature that compels us to upgrade to either of the Premium packages. However, more and more features are being added to the Premium tier, making the gap between the free and paid experience ever larger.

The cumulative effect of adding lots of small, moderately useful features will mean that, over time, more people sign up to a Premium package.

Do everything you can to get every ounce of goodness out of LinkedIn via the free account. Once you’ve done, maybe you should think about upgrading to a Premium account.

You might even go the whole hog and pay for a Sales Navigator account, which provides even more features. I can’t write with any authority about that, as I’ve never used Sales Navigator, but many of my friends in the LinkedIn training community believe it’s worth the investment.

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Final thought if you’re considering spending money on upgrading to a LinkedIn Premium account (and admittedly I’m biased here):

You might well get more value from staying on a free LinkedIn account and using your budget to join the Espresso+ community for a year (currently £420) versus upgrading to Premium Business and going it alone. We provide ongoing help and support to small business owners and service providers who want to get ahead on LinkedIn and online.