Let me share with you a little story: I decided to upgrade to a Business Account on Linkedin basically because I had a business reason. I wanted to contact a freelance professional that I found on the site that was apparently available, to propose a really interesting business project as an interim professional.

The professional was not sharing contact info and was not open to contacts from anyone. This preference set-up is very common and is particularly not good if you are willing to be found (if you are contractor). I thought about not contacting him since his set-up does not seem very mindful of his environment and may speak very little about his attention to detail. On second thought, I decided to give him a second chance and consider that the professional was not really social network savvy and had just posted his profile but not really knowing what he was doing or why it was useful or could benefit him.

The only way for me to get in touch with him was via the mysterious – almost mystical – InMail. I didn’t think it over much (since I was very interested in contacting the freelancer) and upgraded my account.

This is what I received:

Benefits of a LinkedIn Premium Account

Hi Jordi,

Thank you for upgrading to a LinkedIn Premium Account! Your LinkedIn account now contains five benefits that aren’t available to free account holders.

As a premium subscriber, you get these perks:

1. InMail™ messages to get the conversation started. No need to wait for an introduction: with InMails™, you can send a message to any of the 50 million members on LinkedIn.
2. View the full profiles of all LinkedIn members. Be fully prepared with background information on potential clients, hires, and business partners.
3. Find the right people, faster. Sharpen your ability to find decision makers, experts and leads with three times more search results. Try our advanced search.
4. Save and organize new contacts into folders of your choice. You can save important profiles into your Profile Organizer, a workspace that makes it easy for you to keep track of them, and stay up-to-date with notes and contact information. Get started with Profile Organizer.
5. See who’s viewed your profile. Get more information on who’s interested in you from customers, to suppliers, to recruiters and more. View the complete list.

To see some of these services in action, sign-up for a complimentary training session on how to get the most out of your Premium Account.

We hope you enjoy your new powers on LinkedIn!

Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Team

After a little bit of trial and investigation of the benefits of the upgrade, here are some comments:

1. InMail™ messages to get the conversation started. – NOT

I have already used one of the three InMails to contact the professional, and it has been ignored. InMails are just e-mails. Basically you don’t need something with a new name that does exactly what e-mails do.  There are several ways to get around not knowing the target professional’s address. Amongst them, you can always “Send him an Invite”. The target will get quite an odd message, that’s true, but with the right wording, you should overcome the initial awkward impression by including … “I thought it would be of professional value to be connected I’m also sending a Linkedin invite to stay in touch…”

2. View the full profiles of all LinkedIn members – NOT

Not True either. You can and will only see the professional profiles of those who make their profiles public. On top of that, a lot of people still have incomplete profiles, so this won’t allow you to see any more of them … since it’s just not there. Disappointing feature.

3. Find the right people, faster with advanced search

Honestly, I have to say that I cannot see “any “difference of value between the standard search and the premium search.  Further disappointment.

4. Save and organize new contacts into folders of your choice – Profile Organizer

Interesting feature for corporate accounts with more than two people looking at profiles, with specialised tasks (for instance ‘profile searcher’ and ‘approver-manager’) may be of certain value. Organizing the Prospecting in this sense is the only value that this new functionality may provide, and it is definitely not very valuable for the rest “not so complex” users.

5. See who’s viewed your profile – NOT

I have to admit that this was one of the most intriguing and fascinating features of the upgrade. Since I’ve had my Linkedin account I have been (I guess we all have … please admit it!) fantasizing about who and why someone was taking a look at my profile, with no rationale behind – you never know what’s on people’s mind but my guess, at this point, is that it would just be curiosity, after all. I was also fascinated by the intriguing message: “To see more people, upgrade your account”.

I felt that actually knowing the name of the people that has taken a look at my profile may give me a clue on why they would spend any time staring at my profile – a potential client? A potential provider? A potential job offer? ….

The report on this feature is that the information that you get is exactly the same as the one that you get with the free account, which nothing else than “Someone at Hewlett-Packard”, “Project Manager at Ericsson”, “Sales Manager at T-Systems” and so on. You get to see all the people, but only in those vague terms.

It is VERY disappointing … I radically support Linkedin (by itself or in comparison with the rest of tools out there), but this time I cannot help them make more money.

I will positively note that the look and feel of the premium account is better. It has a good lay-out, with the important tabs on top (the ones that the basic account has on its left-hand-side column: “Home”, “Groups”, “Profile”) and a better use of the screen space.

Overall my recommendation would be that small firms, independent recruiters, networkers, job seekers … need not to upgrade their account to a Premium service and just take full advantage of the potential of their basic account, which is, by the way, enormous.