Are you wondering, “Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?”
Many professionals find it challenging to decide if investing in LinkedIn Premium is beneficial.
In this episode, you will learn about the key advantages of LinkedIn Premium. Our host and CEO, Porschia, alongside our guest, Kevin D. Turner, will share their insights on how LinkedIn Premium can significantly enhance your career!
They discuss practical features such as advanced search filters, viewing who has visited your profile, LinkedIn Learning courses, and AI tools that aid in networking, skill development, and increasing visibility to recruiters. The conversation also includes advice on making the most out of the free version of LinkedIn before upgrading to Premium, ensuring you maximize your investment.
Kevin D. Turner is the Managing Partner of TNT Brand Strategist, specializing in technology and business-focused branding. He has transitioned from Fortune 50 sales and marketing to venture capital, turnarounds, leading a nonprofit, and running a successful business for over 13 years. Kevin’s expertise includes visioneering, communications, and culture building, with a passion for developing talent and high-performance teams.
What you’ll learn:
- Understanding the value of LinkedIn Premium and whether it’s the right choice for your professional needs.
- How LinkedIn Premium facilitates more strategic networking and professional growth
- Effective strategies for using LinkedIn Premium’s tools and AI options to expand your professional network and increase engagement
- When to consider upgrading to LinkedIn Premium based on your career needs and goals
- Tips on using LinkedIn to maximize career growth opportunities, with a focus on “Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?”
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today, we are talking about LinkedIn is LinkedIn premium worth it with Kevin D. Turner. Kevin D. Turner is managing partner of TNT brand strategist, a technology and business focused organizational and personal brand builder with deep expertise in visionary communications, culture building, and creating disruptive advantages.
He has successfully pulled off five evolutions in his career, transitioning from Fortune 50 sales and marketing management to venture capital to [00:01:00] public and private turnarounds, leading an international nonprofit, and turning a side gig into a 13 year successful business. Kevin’s passion for talent development and cultivating high performance teams globally while profitably managing branding and growing organizations has contributed to his career success.
Hi, Kevin. How are you today?
Kevin D. Turner: Portia. Fantastic. And I appreciate you having me here today. I’m excited to be here. And that was the best I’ve ever heard my intro. Fantastic. I love that.
Porschia: Thank you. I like to roll out the red carpet when I can for our guests, Kevin, and you have a really interesting background that we’re going to dig into today.
And we’re thrilled to have you with us to discuss if LinkedIn premium is worth it. But first we want to know a little more about you. So tell me about seven year old Kevin.
Kevin D. Turner: Seven year old Kevin he grew up [00:02:00] moving in different countries in different states. So that was my childhood. My father is English, my mother is Irish, proof that can actually work, but they had to leave and come to America, right?
My experience at seven years old was really about being new to the area, right? Not knowing that many people. And how do you then figure out who should, how do you get to know people? It’s easier when we’re kids, right? You can actually walk up to somebody and say, Hey, you want to be friends.
Do that. And it worked. Now you do that. People run away from you, but it was just figuring out that you could do that, that’s acceptable. And some people will say, no, I don’t want to be your friend, blow it off. And I learned some people say, yeah, I want to be your friend.
And things happen from there. So I think very early on that, that seven year old Kevin understood a little bit about networking in that sense. I didn’t know what it was called [00:03:00] still. I’m not so sure, it, it was natural and it worked for me. So that’s who I was. Very artistic, creative, not as sports driven, as a guy. So that makes you a little unusual. And I just had a passion for the outdoors. That was who I was as a kid. And also loved music. My parents instilled both art and music into us. And so we would wake up in the morning. My dad had these really big German Wharfdale speakers that looked like you were throwing a concert.
These things were so big. And he would put on things like. Good day sunshine or something from the Beatles, right? Just blasting so hard it would rattle things off the shelf in your room. And that’s how the day started. And he would cook a big English breakfast. They would feed as well. And back then, what you would do as parents is you got them up early, got them charged up, you fed them, and then you kicked them outside.
And you said, be [00:04:00] home before the street lights come on. That was it. And that’s how you raised kids, right? We were, I’d say, free range children, right? I learned a lot. We stuck together. We took care of each other. Yeah. We adventure all the time. We weren’t afraid of too much and we had to learn to communicate really well because of that environment.
And I always feel a little bad because, I raised my kids. They didn’t quite have that same experience in the sense of get out there and go adventure. All right. Too much of this, the digital thumbs going and there’s all sorts of adventures you can have there. It’s some good, some bad. I just wish they’d had a little more of that kind of free range childhood.
So that was me.
Porschia: Yeah. So what was your first job, Kevin?
Kevin D. Turner: Oh, first job probably newspaper delivery as a kid. Loved it and hated it. Loved the money, right? Hated the wake [00:05:00] up hours. And I actually enjoyed a lot of the people that you would throw the paper to. Wonderful
Porschia: people. And
Kevin D. Turner: they’d be ready, waiting to catch it, right?
But they were excited because it was their news. That’s how they got it. And then there were the other people who were never happy, right? It never landed where it was supposed to go. You didn’t bring it on time even if you did, but you had to go with it. So it was a good learning lesson because you had to be up early, organized.
You had to get all your papers you had to know who’s who. You also had to know who wasn’t paying from a paper because if you kept throwing them a paper, then you don’t get paid. You actually pay for that paper as a paper boy or paper kid. I don’t know what you’d call it. But to me, it was just an incredible experience.
Now I only did it for probably two summers. Yeah. Couldn’t do it during the school year, but I did it during the summers. And I would do it again if I was a kid again.
Porschia: Yeah. Tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you [00:06:00] started the business that you have now.
Kevin D. Turner: My career has been all pivots. You got a little background on me. Some of those pivots were forced upon me and some were choices I made in the process. And both Things became better after the pivot, right? But on each one of them, it was about understanding what did I not like about where I came from?
What do I want now to do that’s going to make me excited, happy, and that I know I can contribute to, and then figuring out what skills do I bring forward to make that happen? And I did. I went from very different things. When I first joined Sony Corporation, which was the first company, Fortune 50 company I started as a retail sales associate, showing up, delivering brochures, Went from there into a marketing specialist or [00:07:00] actually did eight millimeter events like at the Plano Balloon Festival and things like that.
We loaned out camcorders, changed that whole market, went into sales went into training and went back into kind of sales management. Left Sony, the regular electronics lines and went into the wireless industry for Sony with a Sony Qualcomm joint venture. That ended up blowing up. They divorced each other as a parent companies and sent us on the road.
That was probably the first big pivot. That’s when I went into venture capital. And what I did there is I found things I liked about what I was doing, especially in product design and doing things that the engineers were talking about. And then how do you create a business plan around that to make that function?
That took me into venture capital. From there, I just, I started networking with everybody I knew and really started targeting, how do I get the introduction to these companies? I was big [00:08:00] on data management at the time, privacy issues that came from that Qualcomm CDMA phone triangulization.
We could pinpoint you within 25 feet of wherever you are. We could serve you coupons, right? We could create a revenue stream. But then let’s say a lawyer subpoenas that information and we’re 25 feet unaccurate, right? You went in the 7 Eleven but it looks like you went somewhere else that you weren’t supposed to go.
Because the inaccuracy, what is our responsibilities? It got all into this data management. And that’s what I’ve approached the venture capital groups with, is how do you make data respective data, right? Use of data in appropriate ways. How do you make that a competitive advantage? Because consumers want you to take care of their data.
A little ahead of time. I always say turn of the century and a lot of people weren’t thinking about it. But from there, I got to meet most of the data commissioners around the world. I got to do presentations in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates and Belgium and really worked through that [00:09:00] process of getting people to understand that advantage to their organization.
From venture capital, the the individual who actually owned the group, it was worth 600 million. He decided he just wanted to retire. And so he said, you know what, tell me what you want to do and I’ll help you, but we’re going to close the venture capital down. And he was a handshake person, right?
He made a deal by a handshake. That’s how he got his whole venture capital group built to 600 million was all on handshakes. To me, that was fascinating because that doesn’t happen often. People’s word isn’t always as good as, what the writing is on the paper. And so he taught me that’s more important, right?
In that process. And he helped me go into turnarounds, doing corporate turnarounds of organizations. I turned around American teachers, actually brought it to sale and they had probably 40 shareholders. They could never make a decision. So [00:10:00] walk from there, went into turning around a, Christian book company.
in Nashville, loved it. One of the issues I found out really quickly on turnarounds, when you do it well, you put yourself out of business. And that’s what I did there. I turned around the division and they sold the company. The new buyers said, you know what? I love everything, but I don’t really want that division anymore.
So I put myself out of business. I said, I’m not going to do turnarounds anymore. I’m going to start focusing on. Other areas. And that’s one I went into from there. I went into what we would call a fortune 100 non profits, right? Fortune 50 non profit. I went to work for American Heart Association.
They had an international division for emergency cardiovascular care. What does a guy who did electronics at the beginning and marketing know about? cardiovascular care, nothing, but I understood people understood publishing. I understood international cultures, how [00:11:00] business is done differently. And so I was able to bring that in.
And I took American heart association from being accidentally outside of the U S because people would come to the U S they would get their certifications, they would go back to their country with a stack of books. They’d start reprinting the books. They would change the science and they would issue their own cards.
They almost lost their brand outside of the U. S. So my job was to gain control of that. And so I set up offices in Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates, in Belgium, in Puerto Rico, all and then hired people all to kind of service everything outside the U. S. And so we went from probably about 30 countries by accident Into 140 countries on purpose, bringing back revenue, which I always loved because nonprofit never calls it profit, right?
They call it surplus. It’s the same thing, especially because what I had was not committed. It was not only surplus, [00:12:00] but leadership could do whatever they wanted with it. because it wasn’t based on the components of American Heart Association, which has different groups within the United States that all had a input and said, I want X amount of that.
This was something brand new. So just an incredible opportunity, but what I found there, and this happens to me often, I get totally into what I do. I was traveling 85 percent of my month. Trying to raise a family, have a relationship, on the opposite side of the clock, one weekend a month you’re home, and all you want to do is sleep, and all you want to do is play.
I said, can’t keep doing this. And basically put the brakes on, and sat with my wife and said, what do you want to do? What, what would be fun to do? And for years, I’d always helped people with LinkedIn. And I used to do during this timeframe, I used to do seminars, sometimes it’d be 600 people in a group, sometimes it’d be five.
Then we’d be teaching them how to get their next job by. Pulling their [00:13:00] branding together and then utilizing LinkedIn is the platform to get them there right to get them recognized to make introductions that they needed to network into opportunities. And that was a natural my wife is a writer and she’s got a business background board level background, and we enjoy people, we enjoy helping people, so we said you know what, let’s get together, and let’s work on everybody’s personal branding.
And we also do organizational branding, but it was really about that because what we looked at when we saw things like resumes and bios and LinkedIn and people were just taking chunks of information, throwing it in there, jamming it in what I call personal blanding, right? Throw whatever you can in there and you figure they’ll figure it out.
They’ll pick out my good stuff. Nobody does. If it’s not focused, right? If it’s not refined, if I don’t know immediately what Parsha does. I’m not going to move forward because if I have to sort through and figure it out, [00:14:00] that’s not my time. I want something that’s packaged right, so I can move them forward to an opportunity.
And that’s how we got into it, and we’re loving it because we get to work together. And, two different sides of the writing style. Life’s a little more traditional little more structured a little more. Dramatic. I’m a little more dramatic, a little more marketing, a little more, bam in your face.
And you combine the two and it works because if you’re applying, if you’re networking, you have to have this kind of more subtle approach in the resume. It’s more conservative, right? You’re on LinkedIn. It’s a social platform. It’s about meeting people, connecting with people. And if you put your resume out there, like most people do on LinkedIn, it’s dry.
It’s dull. It’s like being the insurance salesman at a party, right? Hopefully I don’t offend anybody, but as soon as you say it, they’re like That’s how people were putting themselves out there and that’s how [00:15:00] they were branding themselves. And so that became the new business. And we’ve been doing that for over 13 years.
We absolutely love it. We’re one of LinkedIn’s highest rated service providers. So believe it or not, LinkedIn has a lead program. If you run your own small business, you can join service providers and they’ll give you the opportunity to compete for leads on LinkedIn. When somebody comes in and says, I need this.
Then five people get to give a proposal. And that individual may talk to one, may talk to all, may blow them all off, whatever it is, but you’ve got a chance,
Porschia: right?
Kevin D. Turner: And so that became the basis builder of that business. And we haven’t looked back. We love it. It allows us much more flexibility.
We could be at the beach, right? Working on LinkedIn, working on resumes or bios or anything else. And it doesn’t really matter. So we can enjoy ourselves. We can get out, do things that we couldn’t do before. And we have that [00:16:00] flexibility. And I love that.
Porschia: And
Kevin D. Turner: I’m one of these that I throw myself all in.
Porschia: I heard a lot of interesting things in your background, but I think I zeroed in on the networking and the data management aspect of it, of course, with the branding and When I think about all of those things, LinkedIn just falls in line with all of those. So you definitely, I’m sure just found and navigated to the place where you really needed to be, Kevin.
Kevin D. Turner: My passions too. That’s what was really nice about it. That’s why it fits. And I think people need to start looking at what are they passionate about? What are they good at? What do they want to do? And start focusing themselves to get there. That’s a nice thing about LinkedIn. That opportunity exists on LinkedIn to take where you are and to decide where you want to be.
and then fill that gap in so you can get there. And whether that’s through networking or through [00:17:00] upskilling or whatever it might be, becoming a thought leader in an area, it’s a platform that allows you to do that, where that was much more difficult before LinkedIn came around.
Porschia: So we’ve discussed LinkedIn on the podcast before, back in episode 11, when we talked about how to network on LinkedIn.
You’ve mentioned that the value of LinkedIn depends on a person’s goals. Tell us more about that.
Kevin D. Turner: Absolutely. I look at LinkedIn, first of all, as a microcosm of the world, right? Whatever you want to find, you can find it on LinkedIn. Whatever you need to accomplish, you can accomplish it on LinkedIn.
Anybody who tells you there’s one way to do it. isn’t really thinking about the fact that it is that microcosm of the real world. There’s a lot of different ways you can do things. There’s always best practices, right? Things that work better. And I always tell people, if it works on the outside, it’s going to work on the inside.
If people don’t like spam, don’t go [00:18:00] spamming him in LinkedIn. If people don’t like to be stalked, don’t go stalking them on LinkedIn. If people like to be gifted things, rewarded complimented, these kind of things, those work within LinkedIn. And so I just tell people take that perspective and I’m a firm believer that networking always beats not working.
And that is whether you’ve got a job or not, if you continually network, opportunities are always going to come to you. And people forget that. Sometimes they get comfortable, right? I like what I’m doing. It’s great. And I could do this forever. And they get comfortable and they stop networking. They stop helping other people.
They stop talking to people. And all of a sudden the company says, you know what? We’re a company. We just did the books and you got to go. And then they’re in this position where they’re like, Wait a minute, I haven’t done this in years. I don’t know anybody anymore. [00:19:00] That’s because they stopped that networking component.
Had they kept that going, an opportunity probably would have picked them up before they were left in that situation. Or they would have been able to really then capitalize on how many people they’ve helped already to this point. Because if you help somebody in a job transition, and then one day you need a little bit of help, they will do everything for you.
And that’s not the reason to do it, man. They’re always say the what is it? Givers get 10 X. It’s true. You don’t do it to get 10 X, but you get 10 X because you do it. And people need to start thinking that way. And LinkedIn, I think allows that to happen, but there are so many options within LinkedIn.
Yeah. That you can really approach it with your own goals in mind, your own personality, the way you like to do things, there’s audio rooms where you could share knowledge and have conversations, there are [00:20:00] lives that are basically like you, LinkedIn’s given you your own television station.
for free, right? That’s amazing. You can do that. Or if you just like to write about things and post, or maybe it’s just comments, or maybe it’s likes, or maybe it’s behind the scenes, it’s DMS, helping people, giving people information, but get active on LinkedIn. Just find out which piece works best for you and know that there isn’t a formula.
People always try to tell you there’s a formula on LinkedIn. Do this, do that, follow this algorithm. It’s a little bit ridiculous. If you are following what people tell you is the algorithm of LinkedIn, they’re basically studying the past. Because the only way you can tell them, you’re looking at what it used to do is algorithms are continuously evolving, right?
So if I study and say, Oh, this is what the algorithm does. That doesn’t mean it’s going to do it today or tomorrow [00:21:00] or next week. Just go out and figure out what works for you. And the people that will want to associate with you will find you and the momentum will build. And that’s best route for anybody if you’re chasing these little get rich quick schemes on LinkedIn.
They don’t work except for the person selling them.
Porschia: You said a lot. A lot of great things there, Kevin. One thing I zeroed in on was networking always beats not working. I think that is an important note for people to remember. We have had a lot of clients in a similar position to what you mentioned.
They just said, Hey, haven’t looked at LinkedIn in three years until they got laid off, or until something happens at the company, and then they want to start looking for a job. So staying active on LinkedIn continuously can definitely benefit people more than I think a lot of people even realize.[00:22:00]
Kevin D. Turner: We’ll shy away from it because there was a stigma. If you were on LinkedIn, you’re looking for work. So if you’re employed, people are like I can’t look like I’m looking for work. That’s the old LinkedIn. LinkedIn started as the world’s, what’s going to be the world’s largest database of resumes.
That was LinkedIn. And its business model was selling to recruiters. That was LinkedIn. That was the original purpose of the business, but they brought the networking components in and they developed it to a point now where that’s a smaller piece. It’s almost you’re not in business if you’re not on LinkedIn now, so has nothing to do with anybody having any other perception.
And LinkedIn, their boss is on LinkedIn. Customers are on LinkedIn, right? Their potential customers or new bosses or whatever you want to say, they’re on LinkedIn. They’re all there. And they’re all experimenting with this new system, right? It’s not really that [00:23:00] new. It’s almost 20 years. But they’re all getting comfortable with it.
You have an advantage if you can get in there and help them become more comfortable. There are very few places in this world that you can talk directly to CEOs of companies. But you can on LinkedIn, you can comment, you can add value to their conversation, you can invite them to connect.
Whereas if you tried that any other way.
Porschia: Yeah.
Kevin D. Turner: Really dead ends and they get, they call the security guard, right? Take them off campus. Yeah.
Porschia: You’re right. That’s a huge opportunity for people. And I think that a lot of people really have only realized that in the last few years, how LinkedIn’s not just for when you need a job, but for all of those other instances that you’ve mentioned.
I also zeroed in on when you mentioned that there isn’t a formula on LinkedIn. And to your point, I always see people selling, the LinkedIn formula, beat the algorithm kind of stuff. So I thought that’s a very interesting [00:24:00] viewpoint to have, and I want to dig in more there. But in your opinion, what are some of the most useful features on LinkedIn?
Kevin D. Turner: I think some of the most useful features on LinkedIn, I think it would, it starts with building a network, right? You can stay in contact with that network as you build it. And you think about it in the past, I had global experience. I can go on [00:25:00] LinkedIn now today, and I can see people in in India, in South Africa, in Puerto Rico.
I see them every day, right? My connectivity level is incredible. Because they’re all there, because they’re in my feed, because I’m following them, to me that’s the greatest feature, is the fact that it’s 24 7, it’s fully connected, even if they post at night because they’re on the other side of the world, you’re going to read it the next day, but you’re connected with them.
To me, getting in there and understanding that piece that’s the core of LinkedIn. Features that, that help that, I’m big on posting doesn’t start out easy, right? It starts out slow. You might do many posts and nobody says anything. It’s quiet, right? And then it will start to build.
People will start to people will start to comment, and that momentum builds. And what is interesting about that [00:26:00] on LinkedIn, if you are adding content to LinkedIn, you’re in a very small group. It’s less than 10 percent of people on LinkedIn. Add content. LinkedIn is this huge database, right?
It’s now over a billion profiles. All of those are resumes in their own sense, right? A lot of data in there. LinkedIn’s business. It’s a 17 billion company. 65 percent of LinkedIn’s business comes from selling members to other members. Technically on LinkedIn we’re actually the product, not the customer.
And so if that’s the majority of the business, if you can become the perfect product, LinkedIn promotes you, right? So that’s how you break out of this. Nobody can find me cause I’m one in a billion to now I’m number one in a billion for what I do, and that goes back to activity and the reason LinkedIn [00:27:00] rewards activity.
If you think about it, if we’re the product. And we’re active. They know that our data is accurate and accessible, right? You can sell that. If I jump on LinkedIn once every five years, I’m not active. My product’s not good to sell because I could sell that to a recruiter and the recruiter sends a message on LinkedIn and I never respond.
And the recruiter’s give me my money back. But they know if they put me out there. And somebody reached out to me, I would reach out to him immediately because of that activity level. So LinkedIn looks at us, we have a timed value of data. So the more active we are, the more LinkedIn promotes us. So get out there and just start working some of these tools.
Posting is my favorite. You can do video posts, you can do text posts you can do GIFs as images, right? I love to do that. That’s my [00:28:00] thing is I like to make GIFs because they stop the scroll, right? People go by what was that? And it doesn’t have to be played. It’s not a video, so you can watch it at work.
But there’s a lot of different ways to get that going. And that to me is probably one of the best things to start with. If you like sharing, LinkedIn lives are incredible. As far as building brand, right? You can do a live and using a third party streamer, you can then put it on YouTube.
You can put it on Apple podcast, right? So you can then take one session that took you maybe an hour live, and you can actually produce all these other things for you. Content, product exposure. That to me is fantastic. Now the other side of that is this audio events, and they’re really open conversations that are not recorded in the sense, some people record them, but it’s not within LinkedIn.
They’re not recorded. So they’re very feral conversations, [00:29:00] but you can go into those and you can build your thought leadership in there very quickly because it’s not recorded. If you made a mistake. Only the people in the room know, right? You learn, you get better, you get more comfortable. It’s an incredible way to improve public speaking, not being afraid of, getting out in front of people, because it is audio.
It’s just a picture of you, right? Picture sitting there, You can talk a little more freely, you can get more comfortable to the point where maybe now you can present in public, right? So it’s that stepping stone and the relationships that you can build digitally are sometimes even stronger than the ones you can build in person.
’cause sometimes there’s more barriers in person than there are in at digital. People feel a little more comfortable. I’m at home, I’m on my phone, or I’m on my computer. It’s safe. You can build a little more relationship at times. I just came back from the uk. I presented on LinkedIn at one of the first LinkedIn focused conferences in the UK [00:30:00] called Uplift Live.
And I met people that I have known for 10, 15 years, some of them, and never met them, I call in real life, right? I’ve never met them in real life. They were exactly who they were. Some of them actually were a little taller. A funny, that was the only thing, height was the thing, but everybody else, everything else was perfect.
Exactly as they are on LinkedIn, their personality came through. I knew who they were. There wasn’t anybody who surprised me or who are you? I knew these people and so many of them said, Hey, if you want to extend your trip, you can stay on the couch. You can come to our place. You can go down to the lake with us.
There was that connectivity all based on this digital relationship, which you can create on LinkedIn doing these kind of things. And that was proof in that sense. We had people coming from all over the world just to get together to meet everybody they’ve known digitally for so long.
Porschia: That is great. So Kevin, the most common [00:31:00] question I get from clients is LinkedIn premium worth it? How would you answer that question?
Kevin D. Turner: And that’s a big question because obviously there’s money involved, right? There are things that you can do on premium that you can’t in basic, but overall, a basic membership on LinkedIn will give you the ability to do these networking things, to do things like lives, to do things like audio rooms, to post, to build, to do those things.
Now, in the last year, LinkedIn has put some restrictions on the free accounts, which they never did before. Pretty much if you got in, you had a pretty good full use of LinkedIn. Now they’ve limited things like personal invites. If you want to send somebody an invitation, you can’t send more than five a month where you actually say [00:32:00] something in them, right?
Those are your best connections. So they’ve limited that now for the free account. They’ve done the same thing within groups. If you joined a group, you used to be able to network within that group. Even at people who are technically outside of your network, now LinkedIn has put limits there as well. So what they did is they took away that some of the networking opportunity, and in one way they made premium a better value, but I don’t like that’s how they built value in premium.
Right, or a piece of it, they’ve done a lot of really great things in the last year that I think have really built a lot more value in premium, but they were by adding things to premium as opposed to taking them away for free, right? So I like that approach much better. And to me, if you are maximizing everything that you’re getting with the free account.
what I call [00:33:00] freemium, the basic, right? If you’re maximizing that and you want more you’re running into those restrictions. You’re not getting access to where you need to be. Then that’s the time to look at premium, right? And premium fits into two forms. You’ve got a basic premium. It’s normally called job seeker premium.
Or it’s called LinkedIn learning premium, and it’s a light version of business premium. You have less search filters, you have less in mails, the regular business premium, I think you get 15 a month. Those are mails you can send to anybody and they hopefully will respond. I think they’re more like spam now.
In the basic premiums, you get five. I don’t use mine. I’ve been a premium member since I think 2013, 2014, somewhere in there. I never use mine. They accumulate for three [00:34:00] months and then they fall off and, mine always go away. I don’t use them because to me, in mail has become kind of spam, right?
If I get an in mail, I know it’s a pitch, right? And so that part of premium dropped in value. Whereas a couple of years ago, you could use in mails. And they were a great way to reach out. Now, I don’t know if you realize how LinkedIn is built, or most people don’t. And that is, it’s built on the model of six degrees of separation.
Within six handshakes, you can meet anybody in the world. And that’s why LinkedIn cuts you off at three. So they can sell you to the other three, right? Or sell the other three to you. Again, we’re the product. That’s how it works. And premium gets you closer into Those other components. That’s basically what you’re paying to get into.
Now the other piece that if you’re trying to build a network, and you are searching for people to connect [00:35:00] to, right? If you’ve got basic, they’ll let you search 100 profiles. And then they’re going to say you’re restricted of searching anymore. If you’ve got this kind of basic premium, the job seeker, the LinkedIn learning, they’re going to let you do 500.
If you’ve got business premium, You can look at as many profiles as you want that month, doesn’t matter. So if you’re really looking at, I need to go out there and I need to find people to connect to, that’s where business premium has a great value, right? They still won’t respond to in mails, but you can find the right people.
And from there, you can do what I call follow first, right? You go to their profile, you follow them, you ring their bell. So you’ll get their content. Hopefully in your feed, right? And then you start commenting, building the relationship, then you invite them, and that’s how you build a strong network that’s focused.
Premium will [00:36:00] help you do that. Now, there are other features within premium. One of them that I really like is who’s viewed my profile, right? If I’m a basic account, there was a time where you could see the last four. Now it’s all gone on premium. You can see the last 90 days of everybody who’s come to visit your profile.
What you can do with that is when you’re going in there and you’re like, oh, this person’s interesting. This person’s interesting. Oh, there’s a recruiter I’d like to talk to. You can reach back to him. You can say, I noticed you were checking out my profile. Is there anything I could help you with? Start the conversation, right?
It is a warm introduction. They basically have left their digital business card on your desk. And if you’re ignoring it, you’re wasting a lot of opportunity, right? You don’t have to respond to them all, but respond to the ones that you find fascinating. So that you know who’s viewed my profile. That’s a great premium [00:37:00] opportunity.
And so again, if you’re building network, I think premium has good value there. Another component of premium is LinkedIn learning. So any of the premiums you get an all you can eat LinkedIn learning. So let’s say you’re looking to do that pivot and you’ve got this kind of a skill set and you need a few more components, right?
If you’ve got premium, you’ve already paid for. All this coursework that’s available with some of the most incredible experts in the world are doing it. They get paid, right? So they’re happy. You’ve already paid so you can go in there and it’s an all you can eat buffet and you can get certificates from LinkedIn.
You can even get them from Microsoft. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that you can qualify through that process, and then it adds that skill to your profile, it adds a certificate to your profile, recruiters see that, that’s how you close the gap for a pivot. To me, that is an [00:38:00] incredible opportunity within premium.
Open profile. I’m starting to think it’s not such a smart thing. And that basically when you turn on open profile, it means anybody within LinkedIn can contact you. That’s led to a little bit of spam, but it’s also led to some good opportunities as well. That’s a premium feature. If you’re looking at competition, you’re looking at companies, right?
Premium will give premium insights into companies. So it’ll tell you how many employees do they have? What type of jobs do those employees have? How long do those employees stay with the company, right? What are the current jobs available with that company as a whole, right? What divisions, what areas what are they looking for with employees?
So there’s a lot of company insights. are a value you only get with premium. Another I think really incredible feature if you’re in the job seeking area, right? Is you can upload your [00:39:00] resume or you can take your LinkedIn profile and create a applicant tracking system ready resume within LinkedIn. And then with premium insights, It can tell you, if you pick a position that you want just a title, it’s going to tell you what skills it sees within your resume and what’s missing.
Sometimes what’s missing, you just didn’t remember to write about it, right? Or use those words. If you get them in there, then all of a sudden, and you bring that into your profile, now you have recruiters contacting you for the right stuff, right? So people often, they’ll look at a job and they’ll say, I’m perfect for it.
But the digital match, the digital processing says, you’re a 40%. Now, technically as an individual, you have all the skills. But you didn’t get them into the wording, you didn’t get them into your skill structure of your profile, and that [00:40:00] resume insights will tell you that. It’ll also tell you what does your competition have, which is a smart thing to do, right?
If you’re racing, you want to know what do they have under the hood, right? What type of tires are they working? That’s a huge value as well, because then you know what you need to do to be a better choice than they are, or even how you’re different, because they may have certain things that you look at and you say, I don’t need that if I go this direction, and that opens up more opportunity for me.
So those, that resume insights, I think is a pretty brilliant piece. There is another tool on LinkedIn, which I think has incredible value for everybody, but it has an extra level for premium. And that’s called interview prep. On the job tab, if you go down the left side menu, there’s an area called interview prep.
And what it’s going to do is it’s going to [00:41:00] expose you to about 250 of the top interview questions. And it’s going to tell you why they’re asking those questions. Like, why do they say, tell me about something that you don’t do so well, right? Why would they ask that? It’ll give you the insight. And if you’re premium, it will even give you sample answers to help you practice, right?
Now, the other open piece of that, and it’s open to everybody, not just premium, but you can also do a video practice of your answer, and it will give you AI feedback, which I think is really cool. It’ll tell you, you used 15 filler words, your tone was depressed, right? Or you hit it right on, on the target here where your answer was too long.
This is the average for that answer. It can really help you fine tune and you’re not paying a coach for it, right? If you wanted to pay a coach, use that tool and be [00:42:00] better when you go in,
Porschia: right?
Kevin D. Turner: You’re paying them less, or maybe you’re perfecting it more, right? Either way, it’s a huge opportunity. But the insights that they give to the premium, and that’s how to answer the questions kind of sample wise.
That’s a huge opportunity. And probably the biggest thing that LinkedIn has done in this last year, and this is what has grown premium they say. And premium is now I think 1. 7 billion dollars of the 17 billion, right? And it’s only I did the math Recalculating if you ever want to see it, it’s terrible.
If you’re a math geek, you’ll love it. Everybody else went. Yeah it’s only about three percent of the LinkedIn population is a premium or this type of premium, right? And to me, that’s fascinating that it’s generating that kind of money that tells you it’s not cheap, average premium. If it’s that basic one, that’s going to be around 40.
If it’s the business one, it’s going to start at about [00:43:00] 70, right? That’s average. So it is an investment, right? One of the things I think they’ve done well this year to make it a better value is they’ve added a lot of AI powered options. The first one that they came out with, I don’t find it very useful, unless you have a almost completely empty profile, right?
That first one would help you figure out your headline, and then it would help you figure out your about section. As long as you completed the rest of your profile, it would try to give you some versions that you could use. You can accept them. You can say, give me another one, right? Or you could edit it and make your own out of that, but it’s a good tool.
Now, if you’re get your branding together and you plug it in there, it’s going to come out worse than what you started. So for somebody who’s a little more advanced, not a good thing, but that AI empowered enhanced the profile, I think is a good step. [00:44:00] They did a couple other things. They did post takeaways.
So if you’re in your feed and you look at a post. You could say too long, didn’t read is an option. It will give you a summary of that post. Maybe it’s an article and it’s 3, 000 words, right? It’ll give you a summary of it. It’ll also say, these are things you might want to think about.
These are other topics related to this. These are experts in this area that you might want to follow, right? Here’s some courses from LinkedIn Learning that could help you build that skill. So a lot of cool little AI components in that takeaway that might help you, either create content or understand the content that you’re reading.
So I think that’s a cool feature. And again, that’s premium only business premium. Post rewrite, which I found was interesting because originally it came out in December of last year. Originally you could put in 20 words and it would write a post for you. Now it wants [00:45:00] you to write a post and it will rewrite the post.
I think what LinkedIn found out really quickly is they were basically creating botted content that nobody wanted to read, right? Because a robot doesn’t have the personal experience we have. They can have some good information. It’s just regurgitating what it’s already read out there, but it doesn’t have the personal experience that gets us excited the connectivity.
And so now they made it a rewrite to make your writing better, maybe a little more exciting, put a hook at the beginning so people jump in there like in the newspaper, because we don’t all think that we should write that way, that’s not our experience. I think it’s a good tool now that it’s focused on rewriting as opposed to writing.
I think that’s neat. I would assume they’ll probably have one to help you with comments pretty soon. Technically takeaways can do a little bit of that for you. They’ve also set up a couple of things in the job seeker area with [00:46:00] AI. One of them is if you see somebody who’s posted a job, let’s say to you, Portia, you’ve posted this job.
I can click on message. And AI powered messaging will come up and it would basically give me a couple of options. Ask Portia about the job. Tell Portia how you’re connected, right? We both went to the same school or whatever it was, right? Or we’re both into marketing and branding. It pulls those things together and it will write a message for you.
Now, much like we were talking before, bots don’t have much personality. So it is pretty dry. You definitely want to go in there. You want to re edit it. But it can get you over that hump of I’ve got to basically create a cover letter or create some kind of communications person, and I don’t even know where to start.
It can be that spark that gets you to where you need to be. So I think In that rush of applying to things, that’s a huge opportunity. I hope they expand that to other [00:47:00] areas. Because I think people do need help in getting their writing going. That writer’s block piece.
Porschia: Yeah. That’s
Kevin D. Turner: getting
Porschia: started.
Kevin D. Turner: Yeah. That’s the biggest advantage. Trying to think what else AI coaching is something that’s available to premium. That’s going to be on your learning side. You can actually go in there and you can go through and set your goals. What do you want to accomplish right in your career on LinkedIn, it’s going to suggest skill sets, maybe that you’re missing that you could create, the gap filler in that process.
It might tell you people to follow in the education side, but it’s really going to work like a digital coach.
Porschia: And
Kevin D. Turner: I think there’s a good need for that because not everybody can afford a coach to take them through that process. But they might be able to with all the bits and pieces that premium gives them if you add up each piece.
All of a sudden you’re getting a pretty good deal if you’re going to use [00:48:00] those tools.
Porschia: You’re not going
Kevin D. Turner: to use any of them. You might as well stay basic, right?
Porschia: Yes.
Kevin D. Turner: So the beauty of LinkedIn Premium, you can get a free 30 day, sometimes 60 day free trial. The 30 days, anytime you go there, they’re going to offer it to you.
If you walk away. A couple of times, they’ll usually come back with a 60 day one. They want to be more enticing. So you walk away from the sale each time, you just leave the farm unfilled. You almost get there, you almost give the credit card, right? And you walk away, that gets them to come back.
The other way is other premium members, a couple of times a year, they usually get 10 gifts where they can give out 60 day premium trials. Now they will ask for a credit card or a debit card to set that trial up. And if you go over the 30 days, you will get charged for the next month. And they will not give it back to you.
Even if you told them one minute later than 30 days. You paid [00:49:00] for it, you don’t get it back. So I always tell people, if you’re going to do a trial, put in your calendar at 28 days, evaluate whether you want to cancel it or move forward with it. That’s the time to figure it out. Don’t wait because they won’t give it back.
But if you’re interested in premium, that’s what I would do. Cause we’re all different. We all have different needs and there’s a lot of offers. You just got to make sure you’re going to use it. Because what we talked about today might sound exciting, but if you paid for it and then never used it, you wouldn’t be very excited, right?
You’d be like that’s money wasted. I liked what it sounded like, but I didn’t use it. The free trial is a way to figure that out and just go gung ho in there and just start using as much of it as you can to see if it really produces value for you. And that’s what I would suggest.
Porschia: You have given us so much to think about Kevin.
I really appreciate it. You have covered a lot of the [00:50:00] features that LinkedIn premium has to offer and a lot of the brand new ones, the AI options that are coming out and being updated every day. So thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge with us. We’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show notes.
So people can find you online. But what is the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Kevin D. Turner: Always LinkedIn. And my URL profile is easy. Everybody says LinkedIn. com forward slash in, right? Forward slash and then whatever they gave you or you customize it. I customized mine on the first day it was allowed.
And I was president of a small company. So mine is linkedin. com slash in slash president. And I come up with anytime they do a search for who’s the president of LinkedIn.
Porschia: You come up.
Kevin D. Turner: So it’s been a nice little branding URL as well. You’ve gotten great [00:51:00] traffic from it,
Porschia: Kevin, to your LinkedIn profile. Everyone’s going to check you out on LinkedIn.
I will say it again, Kevin, you have shared so much. So many tips and secrets with us today. I’m sure our listeners can use it to be more confident in their careers and with their LinkedIn profiles. We appreciate you being with us.
Kevin D. Turner: Thank you very much Portia. I appreciate it. I hope I didn’t talk too much.
I get excited about this stuff because it does build value for all of us. Thank you for having me. [00:52:00]
