You may have recently come across a LinkedIn profile that looks radically different from yours. And you may have asked yourself, “What’s this?” or “How can I get this? I want to be cool too!”
Back in June LinkedIn rolled out an updated version of their premium accounts. And while it is a big leap forward in design, the new premium accounts offer a lot of other new features as well.
Design
The most obvious difference between the free account and the premium account is that the premium account comes with the ability to add a header image to your profile…similar to a Facebook cover photo.
You can say goodbye to your sterile looking profile and add a splash of color and personality to your page. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. LinkedIn makes the process fairly easy by allowing you to either upload your own photo or use one of their stock photos.
LinkedIn has also increased the maximum image size allowed for profile pictures. You even have the ability to bleed your profile picture right into your header image.
Finally, though not overly apparent, LinkedIn Premium also features a much cleaner typography than free accounts. While not a huge deal to some, it’s all about the little things, right?
SEO
Premium account members now have access to a new SEO feature, keyword builder.
This gives you the ability to determine your current search ranking and identify ways to improve your ranking within your network by recommending top keywords to include in your profile. This will help drive more traffic to your profile page from the various search engines.
LinkedIn will also provide statistics on the strength of your profile as compared to your top 100 connections. Pretty fancy stuff.
Open Profiles
While not new, this is a feature that few members take advantage of. Increase your profile views and expand your network with the OpenLink feature. Opting-in to OpenLink will give all LinkedIn members the ability to reach out to you for FREE. It doesn’t matter what degree connection they are. It will also increase your visibility in search results.
Agree to these terms and your profile will proudly display an OpenLink badge. This will encourage more people to connect with you because of the reduced fear of the dreaded “I don’t know you” response.
Spotlight
If you don’t want to spend the money on a premium account but still want the benefits of a pretty profile, you can opt for the Spotlight feature instead. Spotlight contains all of the visual updates that come with LinkedIn Premium for a low price of $10 per month.
This will save you anywhere from $20-$400 per month. Not a bad deal.
That said, I have heard that even the free accounts will get the visual updates at some point. But there is no telling when that will happen.
Other Premium Features
In addition to all the features noted above, there are even more benefits to upgrading to LinkedIn Premium:
You can view the full list of everyone who’s viewed your profile in the last 90 days (without Premium, you can only see the last 5 people).
You can see how people are finding you, view trends, top search terms and look at the industries and locations of people visiting your profile.
You can view the complete profiles of your entire network, including 3rd-degree connections and group members.
You can get up to 25 InMail credits a month (based on your level of service) to send direct messages to anyone on LinkedIn, even if you don’t have connections in common. Bonus: these InMails get credited back to you if the recipient doesn’t reply to your message within 7 days.
And perhaps equally as valuable as the InMail, you can get up to 8 additional search filters (based on your level of service), including job function, seniority, years of experience, and company size which are great for prospecting new business or new talent.
What are your thoughts about the new features LinkedIn has added to Premium accounts? Are they worth the money? How will you be utilizing these to stand out? Share your opinion in the comments below!
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