LinkedIn's Latest New Premium Features - What are They and Is it Worth the Upgrade?

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. This is Neal Schaffer. And you're listening to another episode of maximize your social, how y'all doing? If you follow me on social, you know that I'm a huge soccer fan. And wow, it's been a great world cup so far than, obviously, those of you who know me, my wife is Japanese. And I lived in Japan for 15 years. And I even flew out to Tampa, Florida. To see the Japanese national team recently plays Zambia, which they won some sort of routing, both for Japan and for the United States, hoping that they both advance and don't have to play each other until we get to the finals. That's my dream. I don't know how realistic it is. But hey, we're allowed to dream, right. So today, I want to talk about some recent changes that LinkedIn did. And if you go to my profile, you will see that there is a new header image that is displayed, basically, on top of my profile. In essence, it's the same sort of header image you see on Facebook, on Google Plus on Twitter. And now LinkedIn has gotten into the game, and they have created their own. Now, if you have a free account, you do not get access to what LinkedIn is calling a premium profile. And the idea is that LinkedIn, well, they want to give more value to those that are obviously paying for their service. But they also have sort of upped the ante, I often get asked when I speak, Neal, should I pay for a LinkedIn professional plan or not? Up until now, my advice has always been that really, the LinkedIn paid plans are primarily for recruiters or salespeople. Those people that are doing a lot of searches on a daily basis, they need access to premium search filters. They also are those, for instance, in sales that experiment with the InMail and find that they've gotten a lot of positive responses from it. So for those two categories of people, yes, the premium plan makes sense. If you spend half your day on LinkedIn and generate most of your business from LinkedIn, I think it's a no brainer to spend 20 $25 a month, and really not only pay it forward, but to get access to some of these additional services that can really help you in your business. Now, for other people, I said, Look, if you really want to experiment with the paid plans, LinkedIn has always had something, it's a 999 a month plan, called Personal plus, the personal Plus plan is something that has always been hidden. In other words, in order to find it, you had to go to the who's viewed your profile screen, and you had to upgrade from that screen and from that screen only, and then you would get access to what we call personal plus, it's something that I've been on for few years now. I think at 999 a month, it is a no brainer from someone who uses LinkedIn a great deal. And it gives you access to a few things, it gives you access to the complete who's viewed your profile. And it also gives you access or gives you the ability to become part of what is called the Open link network. The open link network means that anybody can send me an InMail and see my entire profile for free. And that just is allowing me to be a little bit more contactable, it raises my contact ability, as I would say, on LinkedIn, which is important because when people are looking for someone for a particular reason, they don't want to have to deal with introductions, they don't want to have to deal with sending constantly in mails, they want to be able to communicate with you directly as easy as possible. That's why the contact ability part of your LinkedIn profile is so important. So what LinkedIn has done is said hey, if you have a paid profile, we will also give you access to what is called the Open profile. Now at the same time, LinkedIn has also renamed what was called Personal plus, if you go to upgrade now, it's something called Spotlight, it's 999 a month, it's 799 a month for a year, if you upgrade for the year. And once again, it's the same rule you have to absolutely upgrade only on the who's viewed your profile screen. So what else have they added to it in addition to this premium profile? Well, now they call the open link network, they call it an open profile. It's really sort of you know, the same on the who has viewed your profile, you can see how you rank at your current company. I don't think that's really a big deal. In all honesty, maybe some of you will think differently if you work at a huge enterprise like an IP ATM or an Oracle, and you really want to see how you rank in terms of how many people viewed your profile. But the other two things that it gives you it gives you top keyword suggestions I've already used this by going into your summary and editing it. And it's literally saying, hey, people that are similar to you are using these keywords to get found in search results. So you may want to use the same keywords. That's sort of cool. That's sort of a time saver for me that I think has some value. Now, obviously, the ROI of that should be, Hey, am I actually getting seen in more search results, so far, so good, but at the end of the day, it's not just getting more visibility, but more conversions and, and for that the verdict is yet to be seen. But the other thing it gives you, which I think is pretty interesting is a larger search result, those that pay to play on LinkedIn, actually, in search results have their profile appear a little bit larger. In fact, what LinkedIn is saying it's twice the size of a free members. Now, that's pretty critical. Because just like with Google, when people are searching for someone to do business with, for a service provider, for professional, or to reach out to you, for whatever reason, it may be even if you're not looking for a job that, you know, whatever opportunities that are out there, that's huge, right? That's like on Google, getting your photo to show up next to a search result, we all know that those with photos get clicked on a lot more than those that don't have photos, the same thing holds a LinkedIn, it'll be interesting to see how people that show up, you know, with with twice the real estate, are probably going to get more click throughs. And those that don't. So then we get back to the ROI of all this doesn't make sense for 999 A month or 799 a month for an annual pay to do this. And like I said, if you invest in LinkedIn a great deal, you're on it every day, you've developed business from it, it really is a no brainer to pay that a little bit more and get these new premium features. I think LinkedIn is really smart at how they did this by adding a few new new features that are very, very attractive. And for those in the know that can figure out how to find that LinkedIn spotlight plan, you can now access these at a very, very reasonable price. So go out there, go on to your LinkedIn profile, go to the who's viewed your profile page, press upgrade from there, when you press upgrade, it's by default going to send you to a business plan or a sales plan or recruiters plan. But on the far left of the tabs up there, you will see spotlight and that is where you want to consider upgrading. I hope you enjoyed this episode of maximize your social as you know, I like to keep it short and sweet. This is one of the shorter ones. But you know something new from LinkedIn that I wanted you all to be aware of. I'm just the DJ here, mixing up and giving back to you the music that you want to hear in relative terms. So whatever social media questions you have, bring it on. I appreciate Ari Medina, and my friend from the avascular. I hope I still pronouncing that right Ari, the University of avascular in Finland, where I had a chance to recently speak for helping to spread the word to his network. And I also appreciate you Candice for your request. To hear more about Pinterest community boards, I'm going to talk about that in a near future podcast. Anyone else has any requests, you know where I am on social media or just post a comment and maximize your social.com or on one of my posts and maximize social business.com. I really, really appreciate your listening, your subscriptions on iTunes, your comments and sharing this podcast with your friends and those that you think can benefit from listening to it. So that's it. This is a real podcast, a real person trying to do what I can on my mission to empower you with education and really sharing best practices and questions that I get from my clients and my speaking engagements and trying to really find truth and help you all become more efficient at maximizing your social. So until next week, we have another great week of World Cup matches on I hope you're watching them all. Feel free to celebrate the wins with me and to anguish over the losses with me as you'll see me post primarily on Facebook about that, where I am open to your friendship as well. That's it for another week. Wherever you are anywhere in the world. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.