California - UPI
LinkedIn launched Wednesday a redesign of its user profile page for its premium subscribers, bringing its design in line with Facebook and Twitter.
The redesign inclues a larger and prominent profile picture and customizable header image that spans the length of the profile and can be either uploaded by the user or they can choose from header images provided by LinkedIn. This is similar to the profile page styles used by both Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter recently made similar changes to its design and began rolling it out in April, finishing the rollout only recently.
The redesign is available only to LinkedIn's premium members right now and other members, who are using the service for free, can see the new look in "a few months" according to a blog post from the company.
Apart from the redesign the professional social network also launched a larger suite of tools to its premium service, which includes how premium subscribers appear in search results. These users can now select keywords for their profile in the hopes of showing up more frequently in searches and when they do their profiles will be twice as large as those of free users.
Premium members can also make their accounts open, enabling other users to message them and making their profile public to everyone. Earlier this was an opt-in feature but will now be a standard feature on premium accounts.
The new enhancements suggest a move towards greater emphasis on premium memberships. In order to boost paid users, LinkedIn also announced a new premium service called Premium Spotlight, which is cheaper and with fewer perks.