Should I Upgrade My LinkedIn Account to LinkedIn Premium?

In this LinkedIn advice video below, I reveal why it's often not worth upgrading to LinkedIn Premium, but on the other hand also share the one feature of the LinkedIn Premium upgrade that I think is particularly valuable. One of the features of the LinkedIn Premium upgrade I enjoy the most is the ability to see all of the people who have viewed my Profile over the course of the last 90 days. (On a free account you only get to see the last 5 people who have viewed your Profile. I’ll come back to this point later.)



When I pointed this out recently, I was asked the question:

A great question I don’t recall writing about before, so here are my thoughts.

Assuming that you are using LinkedIn on a regular basis and that you have taken the trouble to maximise your LinkedIn profile, then the purpose of your engagement is to attract the audience you might wish to engage with.

When someone takes an interest in something you have written or commented on, be it as a result of sharing a post, an article, or any form of engagement in which you are adding value, then the outcome may be that that person visits your LinkedIn Profile.



I use the ongoing metric of visitors to my Profile as a tool to measure my own engagement performance. When the figure is rising, I know I am achieving good things on LinkedIn. When the figure is in decline, I know I need to up my game!



(example image above of early adoption taking off...)

On a daily basis I take a look at the people who are viewing my profile for a number of reasons:

The first is to establish if the person viewing my profile is either:

• An existing Connection whom I might choose to reconnect with by sending a personal message to enquire, politely, how they are and wonder why they have recently visited my profile. This can often ignite a ‘stagnant’ relationship. It is surprising to me how often this opens up a positive new dialogue between us. I figure there HAS to be a reason they visited my profile. How can I tease that out of them?
• A second (or third) degree Connection that I may not know whom I might reach out to, to establish what interest they had in my profile and have they found what they are looking for?

The person visiting my Profile for the first time gives me the moment in time to offer a hand of friendship and to establish if there is any further value in the possibility of being a Connection with each other. When offered in the right way, a Connection request to a person who has viewed your profile is more likely to be accepted when respondents are approached in a friendly and professional manner than starting off with a sales pitch.

A typical message might go something like this:

The message outlined above is deliberately crafted in such a way as to offer help and value and not be a sales pitch. Any attempts to turn that message into “Let me tell you about my services…” will utterly fail. This is not the time to make your sales pitch!

Another reason why I might be interested in my Profile view visitors is to see if it corresponds with those people who wish to Connect with me. I receive a lot of Connection requests and it is a signal to me of genuine interest on the part of the person wishing to connect that they have also taken the trouble to view my Profile. The lack of such a signal tells me that they may be only gathering an ever-increasing list of Connections for no real purpose in mind other than to add me to it to grow their numbers. Frankly, I don’t need more Connections, but I do love relationships.

If I am embarking on a sales initiative and trying to build relationships with new customers, if that person, or a person from the company I am wishing to engage with views my profile, this is surely a signal of interest. It helps me join the dots on other intelligence I might be gathering that informs my engagement process.

A quick and easy tip to improve a likely connection is, of course, to view, in turn, that person’s Profile. This demonstrates that you are really interested in them too. I have a suspicion the LinkedIn algorithm ‘spots’ this activity too and might be the trigger for you to see each other’s content. At least for a very short while after the data is recorded.

In truth, there may be only a small proportion of people I might follow-up in this way. The person I am viewing will be selected in the first instance by the fact that they represent my ‘target customer’.

Just getting back to the point briefly about this feature from a free LinkedIn account. All of the above can be made available to you too, but you just have to check this data more frequently to make sure you don’t miss an important visitor to your Profile. I often talk about your LinkedIn account being your ‘shop window’ and your Profile view option representing those passing by that are looking in. A shopkeeper would be wise to encourage a person to visit the store and not simply ignore potential customers as they pass by!

I am sure there are other reasons that I find useful in terms of the value my Profile viewers provide, but I’ll leave it there for now.

Please do share any that you think I may have missed over on LinkedIn!