The Latest in LinkedIn Premium & Perks: Is the Value There & Benefits Worth It?

Welcome to the LinkedIn Branding Show by Michelle Squared, the podcast empowering entrepreneurs, experts, and small business owners to rise up and stand out as they build their personal and business brands on LinkedIn. Welcome back everybody to another episode. I'm one of your co-hosts, Michelle B. Griffin.

And I'm the other half of Michelle Squared, Michelle J. Raymond. And Michelle Griffin, this week, we could title this episode, Should I Pay? Is it Worth It?

Or is there anything to do with LinkedIn Premium that makes me think that it's a good idea to spend my money with LinkedIn rather than on something more fabulous off the platform? Because LinkedIn does change an update and our listeners come back to us and ask pretty regularly, should we be paying for LinkedIn? So how about we do an episode on the latest updates on LinkedIn premium? Yeah, we haven't.

I think we try to do these at least once a year. So we're right for that. Michelle, right now, I currently am not paying for LinkedIn. Okay.

It has gotten to be $70, $80 a month, and I'm gladly paying that subscription fee elsewhere. I'll get into that, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. So there's some new things that are coming up. So you can book an appointment where you can have people book a call, schedule it and pay for it through the LinkedIn app, which is so convenient.

And I don't know if that's enough to make you want to do it or people are going to rush to it. But I think that's a pretty business owner-esque forward-facing good thing instead of just AI, AI, AI. It's actually a little bit useful. That is the main one that came out in the last couple of weeks, but they're constantly adding and then subtracting what they're taking.

So the best thing is we'll link in the show notes on what the current premium offers are. But for me, I'd rather have a private Zoom and do it on my own with my power hour that I have people book with me. I haven't tested it. I guess I need to finally test it.

And you have premium, so maybe you could test it one day with someone and report back. Yeah, look, let's talk about this after a quick break because I was also talking to the Pages team about premium recently. So I'll give listeners a quick update on what I can share, like not everything I can because it's top secret. But I think overall, it's just showing where LinkedIn's heading with all of this.

And again, I'm pretty sure that we've got some strong opinions on it. So let's talk about that after this quick break. Today, it's Michelle J. Raymond here, and I hope you're enjoying the LinkedIn branding show.

And if you are, I reckon you'll also enjoy my other podcast, Social Media for B2B Growth. This show zooms out a little. It's where the power of two really comes to life. Company pages leading the way with employee brands amplifying the impact.

We go deeper into how B2B teams actually use LinkedIn to drive trust, demand, and real business outcomes. And I promise you, no hacks. So if you've got room for one more podcast in your feed, check out social media for B2B growth wherever you listen to your podcast. Of course, the details are in the show notes.

Michelle, you've got to tell. I'm privately going to get you to spill the beans, but do tell. And I first want to know your thoughts. Would you ever try to have someone book a call with you?

I don't think it can hurt you to put it on the platform. So listeners, how it works is essentially you would get access on your profile if you pay for premium to be able to put a link there that people can literally click on that link, book a one hour session with you, as Michelle said, and pay for it all within LinkedIn. Now, currently it says that there'll be no fees involved. Like, yeah, while you enjoy using it and then no doubt they're going to take a percentage of it because why else would LinkedIn want to put it through the platform?

So There'll be the honey period where they're like, come over here. Like, let's go and try out this new feature. Are we so nice? You know, it won't cost you anything.

Like, you know, maybe some of the other platforms take a percentage or something. But I get what they trying to do I get why they sweetening the deal But for me I don know I don see that it would integrate very well with other processes that I use I don know about the whole thing being held within LinkedIn I reserve the right to change my mind as always But it just like the LinkedIn services To me, that was always those service pages were always built for people that were, I don't know, on Upwork or Fiverr or that kind of much smaller audience, the freelancers that were doing little jobs.

And instead of having a website, maybe you could have the LinkedIn services page. But for everybody else, like I turned mine off. I don't even have it showing and I don't recommend it to clients. I think it's just too messy, too distracting.

and I'm not sure that it helps because I don't know, maybe that's changed. Do you have it on Michelle? Do you use the services page? We did an episode on this way back, maybe several months ago.

And I think we both said, no, I don't have it. It hurts the user experience to me when you're scrolling, you stop when you really want them to like land on your featured section or your post or something. I think it's just a disconnect. Hey, but if maybe this was services and this book appointment and do it all in one thing, I think I saw someone from LinkedIn saying, hey, if you're a freelancer, you can do everything in a one-stop shop.

You don't have to have a website. I swear, I remember someone saying that when this rolled out recently and perhaps that works, but in this day and age, a website can be free. Stripe is free, but it takes a percentage. So if you don't want to take a cut, maybe that's just good.

Everybody's got a little bit different take, not one size fits all. I don't think it's worth going to premium for that if you're considering it. And I've been doing fine, Michelle, about a year now without premium. I keep getting, sir, once a year you can get a free 30-day trial and they keep wanting me to do it, but I'm not even going to bother with 30 days.

I'm happy on my own. It's all good. So now you have to spill the beans. Look, what happens is like we've been really clear that pay to play is definitely the path that LinkedIn is going down, right?

And it's 23 years into LinkedIn. I'm surprised that it took them this long. we're lucky that they're slow to develop things. From that perspective, from time to time, the pages team, whether it's the engineers or the product team will reach out to me and ask me for my opinions on what would make company pages better.

And in this case, it was the pages premium team. So we've got premium for individuals, we've got premium for pages, and they're also pushing, I think it's called premium duo, where you can sign up and get access to both. And so we were talking about it. So interestingly, LinkedIn from a pages perspective is pushing things that are suitable for founders.

So think about consultants, one person, businesses, solopreneurs, whatever you like to call them. They're pushing for that because there was some astronomical number of new founders that LinkedIn have noticed in their data that last year, that number went skyrocketing. And so they looked at that and went, we are going to create some products and services within LinkedIn to target that audience. If you think about it from that perspective, I can see why they're doing what they do.

The funny thing that I said to the premium guy is I was like, I would never advise a solopreneur to hang out and spend a lot of time and energy on their company page. And he was like, his jaw hit the ground because I like I'm the company pages queen. Like I'm the one that's out there promoting pages. And I said to him, why would you bother?

And so I went back to the beginning and said, the whole point of being on here, generate brand awareness. So that means people need to know I exist. I then want to then be able to nurture those relationships and then have them at some point reach out and buy from me. You know, they can have those conversations in between.

Your company page will never get seen in the feed. And he just kind of laughed I said so you and I know that never going to change That only going to get worse for company pages And then the flip side to that is if you not being seen then why would I put my content as an individual on the page instead of over on the profile And no matter how much you think that that price, which I think the duo where you get pages premium and individual premium, I don't know, I think it's about 150 bucks a month.

So that's a significant investment for a lot of people. It's not the change that the LinkedIn teams probably spend that on the morning's coffees, like at their fancy Empire State building office with their canteens and all that kind of stuff in the building. Like for an individual starting out, I remember when I was starting this business, Michelle, I was scratching and scraping and going, I can't spend money on that because I haven't got an invoice in yet. You know, like back in the very beginning, you are holding on to your dollars as much.

It's not a priority. Let's preface though, because if someone just comes in those podcasts this moment, even though you said that, we do advocate, we have it in the book, Amazon, LinkedIn, brand new book, plus 50 page workbook. We do advocate you should at least set up a company page, put your greatest hits. We're not saying you have to spend all the time and make a content wheelhouse on it, but you should have one.

So I just want to preface that. If someone hears it, we're like, what, what? But I love your honesty and your transparency, Michelle, But that's a lot of money for a startup, solopreneur. There's other more important to me, ROI subscriptions.

Hands down, you can get like three or four products out of that. So I know they have a job to do and I respect that, but it's just a hard thing for me. And I don't know, maybe I'll never go back. I'm just so annoyed by LinkedIn and how much they charge and what little you get.

And they promise a stack of AI, which I'm over. I don't know. I'd love to see more useful tools. But I do have to say, which they don't probably do a good enough job, is that there is a stack of other subscriptions, like you can get Lovable, then Microsoft Word.

There are some other add-ons, affiliate things. So we probably should put a link to that too, because that might be worth someone's time as well, if that adds up. Yeah, look, they've definitely shoved a whole bunch of stuff in there to make that premium that you pay, you know, something that people are prepared to pay. And if you look at it once upon a time, I would have said to people, look, why do I pay for it currently?

And I, because I had such a bad experience with their customer service team, I think I pay half the amount of what it's meant to be like, cause you know, for six months. So just because I had such a bad experience. So for me, because it's half the price that it normally is, I can swallow that. And often I only keep it there because people will ask me during training sessions that I'm doing with teams, should I pay for it?

And I show them, this is pretty much why you shouldn't. The only reason that I know, and I don't think this is reason enough, that I think people are attracted to it is because you can customize more than the three or five connection messages per month to your audience. And sometimes it's, yeah, it's three now. So it's even worse than what it used to be.

Ultimately, what would happen is if you want to connect with someone and you want to send them a customized message, you have to pay for LinkedIn premium if you want to do that more than three times a month. And so that's the only reason for me that I'm telling people. But at the same time, I then say to them, but I found that I get a higher chance of people connecting with me without a message. So even that's gone out the window and all the AI tools on LinkedIn that they're promoting, like do not use them.

Like not help you write a post. It can not help you write your headline, like run the other way. But yeah, the same with pages like that. There's a few things on pages that will definitely help you grow your followers.

Like, but as I said to him, okay, so now I've got like thousands of followers that don't see any of my content and I disappear again. So anyway, this isn't about to bash on it. Do I think you should pay for it? No is the answer.

Unless you want to do the customized thing, it just bugs you. Some people have a personal vendetta about just sending without it I usually try to engage with people I just met I speaking training just met whatever on their posts So I not coming in cold or we so aligned They might like me and hey, if they don't like me, that's fine. Here's what I do. I don't send out a lot of requests anyway, but if I do, I'll go every now and then I'll go into my connection sent, see if there's some that are just stragglers.

I just delete them. Now, in my inbox, I'm not inbox zero on my connection request. I should go do that. I should.

And it's a pain if you let them stack up because you can't just collect, select all and delete them. I mean, I have 200 in there or something. I mean, it's just as bad as embarrassing. Inbox hoarder here.

So I don't know. We're opposites. I'm a one window, inbox zero, except my LinkedIn DMs. I'm ashamed of the state.

Well, my LinkedIn DMs, I keep because I go back to some things. Here's my thing. It's decisions. I'm bad at decisions on some things.

That's all over the place. And we're still going to go on the record. You don't need premium. Spend your money on something more worthwhile.

You don't. Michelle, after this quick break, we'll do an actionable tip about if you, and I'm going to guide this one this week. Let's say we're going to save our money on premium. Where would you spend it?

What tools are you enjoying? So let's talk about that next. Hey, it's Michelle B. Griffin, and this is the LinkedIn Branding Show.

So question for you on your own personal brand. Is it where you want it to be? You know, when we're so close to our own work, our own brilliance, it's hard to see the frame of the picture we're in. That's why I offer the Position Yourself Power Hours.

60 minutes with me, you bring one problem, and we fix your brand blind spots. When you need quick answers, feedback, and just the next steps to get unstuck, check out the show notes for the link. Michelle, you know I geek out on tools. So I think for me, I mean, I pay for a Claude membership, Descript, Canva, Otter.

ai. Those are some of the ones I use all the time and I couldn't live without, I think. And Zoom. I'm probably missing one right now.

I just was in a training today and they're talking about AI tools. There's a gazillion AI tools, but those add up fast. And I just, it's noise. I just want complete focus and what works best for me.

So those are the ones I'm paying for now. I probably forgot one, but they work the best for me. Yeah, look, we're probably the same in our business. So we've got the usual, you know, chat TPT and perplexity and clawed and all those kind of things.

Some we're paying for, some we're not. But I think the tool that I would recommend if you're going to save your money that I think can help people, especially if we relate back to the last episode on LinkedIn video is Opus Pro, because it is the one where you can take a long format of video and it will pull out all of those clips without you having to do that. So between Opus Pro and Descript, they're both my two favorite tools that we use a lot in our business. When I say we, I mean Lil does it all.

But that's how we get to, you know, really get so much value out of the content that we create. So it spreads further. So there's so many tools out there. Listeners, do we think in general that it should be LinkedIn premium you're paying for?

I say keep your money. Go do something more fun with it. You can get like three other tools for the price of one month on a premium. So there you go.

All right, everybody. That's it for another actionable episode. Until then, keep putting yourself out there. You have a brand to build, a business to grow, and people to impact.

We'll catch you next time. Take care. Cheers. Thanks for tuning in today.

More people like you need to be out there on LinkedIn, building their personal and business brands. So we would be so honored if you could leave us a five-star rating and review so we can create more impact with the power of two. That's it for this week. Till next time, connect with us on LinkedIn and keep putting yourself out there.