Is it worth paying for LinkedIn?

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Furthermore, given that there’s an option within the account toolkit to disable people even being able to see your job description if you click on their profile, it’s half of an interesting feature at best. We found, for instance, that American lawyers had been searching our profile, but couldn’t find out exactly who they were. That would have been useful.

Frustrating

Then there were frustrations. We had three new classmates at our place of education, but when we clicked on the link to find out more, we were told that LinkedIn couldn’t find anyone.

Furthermore, the bigger problem with LinkedIn is that it’s allowed itself to be trivialised. Once upon a time, there was a vision that this would be a purely business-centric networking tool, that would allow you to find expertise or workers, and converse from that point on.

With that in mind, why bother allowing people to plug their usually dull and irrelevant Twitter feeds in? It becomes noise that gets in the way of a job that’s tough enough at the best of times. We remain unconvinced that LinkedIn is the first port of call to make valuable business contacts, but wading through Twitter feeds doesn’t make the experience any more pleasant. It feels more like a competitive move against Facebook, and surely LinkedIn isn’t the place for that.

InMails, which you get in the subscription package, to be fair, have a potential use, and go beyond the aforementioned introductions. If there’s someone you want to get in touch with, and you don’t have their e-mail address nor are they a connection of yours or one of your colleagues, you can still mail them.

Again, whether they respond of course is up in the air, and they may choose to see you as spam. But we can still see a benefit to this, and perhaps that’s why InMails are the most closely guarded of LinkedIn’s benefits. You have to spend big to get lots of them, and they’re the closest thing to justifying the subscription price.

Ultimately, and perhaps the conclusion was inevitable, the vast majority of uses aren’t going to benefit from paying for added LinkedIn services. Organising contacts isn’t, for us, enough to justify even a small outlay every month, and thus it’s the extra contact tools that are the key selling feature.

If you need to contact people you’d otherwise not be in touch with, that’s when it’s best to hand over your cash. But until that point, the free LinkedIn service, while diluted by decisions such as the aforementioned inclusion of Twitter feeds and such like, is still the better option.

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