Unfortunately, this is not a yes or no answer. There are many advantages to upgrading to a Premium LinkedIn membership; however, that doesn’t translate into everyone upgrading.
It is absolutely imperative to understand what your purpose is on LinkedIn. Are you on LinkedIn because you are in Career Transition, in which case the Job Seeker upgrade could make sense; or are you a Recruiter, in which case one of the Recruiter memberships could make sense; are you in Sales or Marketing, in which case you have the options of Business, Business Plus, and Sales Navigator; are you the CXO or Owner simply interested in increasing your visibility and your digital footprint; in which case you may not need to upgrade at all… I can provide dozens of examples here, but the main take away is that purchasing a service that you don’t understand really doesn’t make much sense.
Once you have determined your ‘why’, you can now narrow down your options. Let’s narrow our focus to the Sales and Marketing professionals. Should you upgrade your sales team to a Premium membership? What about your marketing team? And your leadership executives?
More questions… How much time does your sales team have to dedicate to a social selling initiative? What do they know about LinkedIn? Do they currently view LinkedIn as a lead generation source or a waste of time? Do they currently use LinkedIn to network, prospect, or provide content marketing and thought leadership to their network? Do they even understand what it means to use LinkedIn to network, prospect, and distribute content?
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It’s important to understand the functionality of the free membership in comparison to the premium membership. It’s equally as important to understand how to implement the functionality successfully. Think about it… would you give the keys to your brand new Mercedes to your teenager to take for a spin when they have never even driven a used klunker and never earned their driver’s license to boot?
No.
Don’t put the cart before the horse. While I highly recommend upgrading for sales and marketing professionals, as well as your leadership team, I urge and invite you to first understand what it means. In upgrading, you have features that will save time, expand your reach, provide information that you otherwise would have had to hunt for, but none of this is relevant if you do not understand how to maximize the potential of LinkedIn.