LinkedIn is the platform to be on if you are selling, recruiting, or networking… but it’s not easy to quantify how well you are doing on LinkedIn.
Enter the LinkedIn social selling index which is helping many LinkedIn users grow through its insightful metrics.
In this guide, we are going over everything you need to know about it and how to get to the top percent of LinkedIn users.
Let’s dive in.
What Is The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI)?
The social selling index (SSI) is LinkedIn’s formula for measuring how effective you are at social selling on their platform.
It was developed by LinkedIn back in 2014 as a way for sales professionals to measure their sales efforts, but nowadays it’s used even outside of sales.
Every LinkedIn user has their own social selling score measured on a scale from 0 to 100 depending on their activities.
These activities are separated into four different areas:
- Establishing your professional brand – How well you establish your brand through your profile, content, and the engagement you are getting.
- Finding the right people – Are you connecting to your target audience/customers and how healthy your network is?
- Engaging with insights – Are your connections and followers enjoying your content by reacting, commenting, and sharing?
- Building relationships – Are you deepening the relationships with your connections through conversing and engaging?
With each area being worth 25 points.
LinkedIn uses these indicators to calculate your score and how well you are doing in each area and where you can improve.
Your SSI score is compared to all other LinkedIn users giving you insights into how well you are doing compared to your industry and your network.
That being said, how to calculate your social selling index?
How To Find Your Social Selling Index On LinkedIn?
When first launched, SSI was a paid feature, but now everyone with a LinkedIn profile can find their social selling index pretty easily.
To find it just follow this link or type it in your browser: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi
Sales Navigator users can also access their SSI by navigating to the admin panel and clicking user reporting.
Once you calculate your social selling index this is what you will see:
A simple dashboard with key information like:
- Your current social selling index score
- How you score in each particular area
- How your score compares to people in your industry
- How your score compares to your network
Your social selling index will be updated daily with an indicator of how much it grew or fell in the past week.
Now that you know your SSI, what good are these numbers without a benchmark?
What Is A Good Social Selling Index Score On LinkedIn?
There isn’t a strict scale for an SSI score being good, bad, or average set by LinkedIn, but there are guidelines set by sales professionals.
An SSI score of 75 or more is considered very good and puts you in the top percentile of social sellers on LinkedIn.
According to LinkedIn’s statistics, having an exceptional SSI means that you are getting better social selling results:
Note that SSI itself doesn’t have a direct impact on your results, but is a great indicator of how well you are doing.
Continuing from the top, an SSI of 51 to 75 is considered above the average of LinkedIn’s whole user base.
A score of 31 to 50 is very low and should be an alarm that you need to improve more than two areas of your score.
Anything below 30 is considered very poor and needs a lot of work. These scores are usually reserved for inactive or passive users.
The last thing you need to know is that your SSI should be balanced meaning that you shouldn’t focus on one or two areas and ignore the rest.
The top LinkedIn users are always striving for 70+ points with each area being at least 15 points.
This would mean that you are achieving your social selling goals and are well-rounded.
With all of this being said, how do you go about increasing your social selling index?
How To Increase Your Social Selling Index
To increase your social selling index you need to look at each area and work on improving them individually.
Here’s how to improve each area:
Establish Your Professional Brand By Creating A Strong Profile
Your LinkedIn profile and the content you post are what sets you apart from other LinkedIn users and show off who you are.
With this in mind your LinkedIn profile needs to be complete, optimized, and clear about who you are.
Here’s how:
- Create a compelling headline that is catchy, concise, and tells people who you are in a few words. Remember that your headline is one of the first things people see and follows you everywhere on LinkedIn.
- Upload a professional profile picture that is inviting, you are at the center point and corresponds with your brand. Even LinkedIn suggests many benefits of having a good profile picture.
- Create a profile banner that connects to your brand and personality and invites people to take action while on your profile.
- Utilize your featured section to showcase your product/service, credibility, and best posts… for people to get a sense of what you can do for them.
- Write a compelling summary that expands your story, and who you are, and makes people feel emotionally connected.
- Ask for recommendations from your colleagues, clients, and bosses to emphasize your skills. A huge bonus is taking skill assessments to prove your skills.
- Optimize your LinkedIn URL for better search results.
- Understand your target audience and create engaging content they enjoy while engaging with other creators’ and followers’ content.
With all of these changes, your profile will be complete in the eyes of LinkedIn and people will understand who you are when visiting your profile.
After some time of posting and engaging on LinkedIn you will start seeing changes in your SSI very fast.
Connect With The Right People In Your Industry
The best way to grow on LinkedIn is to know who you are targeting and connect with those users.
Each one of them is a potential new opportunity for you and LinkedIn knows it rewarding you with bumps in your SSI.
There are several ways for you to connect with intent and grow your network:
- Regularly check who views your LinkedIn profile as these people are interested in you and what you have to offer. Connect with them if they fit your target.
- Connect with your 2nd-degree connections by filtering your network and engaging with them. Mention your mutual connections or ask for warm introductions.
- Use LinkedIn’s boolean search to hone in on the exact target users you are looking to connect with be that they are in your industry or follow people relevant to you.
- Regularly scroll through your feed and look for people talking about problems you solve or talk about topics you enjoy.
- Join relevant LinkedIn groups in your niche and start conversations.
There are many more ways you can connect with people and interesting users can pop up anywhere on LinkedIn.
Note that you shouldn’t just send connection requests for the sake of expanding your network.
Your network needs to be well-managed and full of relevant connections.
Create Engagement With Your Network
What will building a proper profile and connecting with people do for you if you don’t have any interactions?
The pillar of any social network is engagement and community, the same goes for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn gives you many opportunities like showcasing your profile in the feed and recommending your profile when they see you engage.
Not to mention the number of creators interacting with you boosting your profile visibility.
Here’s how:
- Post high-value content that your audience enjoys and finds useful in solving their problems. Even better if this content is easily sharable like lists, infographics, or eBooks…
- Create consistency in your approach to content. Post at least 5 times a week at the same time, have a distinct style that you follow, and follow trends.
- Engage with your audience in the comments of your posts in the first few hours of posting. Ask questions, expand on the conversation, and invite people to comment.
- Engage with relevant creators by commenting with valuable comments on their posts inviting them to reply. Build a habit of commenting at least 10 times a day.
Sharing relevant content and creating conversations will put you in everyone’s eyes.
An example of this could be a LinkedIn poll post about a relevant topic in your industry.
Build Meaningful Relationships With Your Network
In the end, LinkedIn is all about conversations and building relationships with people all over the globe.
These relationships can sprout into partnerships, business or job opportunities, and long-lasting friendships.
LinkedIn loves seeing you regularly starting and coming back to conversations.
It takes time but there are things you can do to make it easier:
- Write your connection invite message with intent. Clearly tell the person why you are connecting and what you would like to talk to them about.
- Build trust with your connections by helping them out without asking for anything in return or sharing valuable resources with them.
- Regularly come back to conversations and talk with them about news in your business and how they have been doing.
- Always be responsive and don’t leave any messages unanswered.
- Include your whole team in the conversation through referral networking methods.
There isn’t a hack to building relationships as they shouldn’t be forced, but it’s on you to take the first step and keep conversations going.
To aid you in this, you can use the Smart Inbox and keep your most important conversations at the top with Pins.
Always stay on top of your inbox by Tagging your connections and creating different categories for better organization.
How Important Is The Social Selling Index?
It really depends on what you are looking to do on LinkedIn.
If LinkedIn is your primary sales or recruiting platform, for example, the social selling index gives you great insights into areas you need to improve.
Note that SSI doesn’t directly impact your ability to sell or your visibility on LinkedIn.
If you get more visibility or leads… it’s due to your hard work, not the SSI being high.
That being said, the social selling index is a great tool that you can use to track how you are improving your LinkedIn networking efforts.
We recommend that you don’t solely focus on building up your score, but use it as a guideline on what you need to work for.
Conclusion
The social selling index is a great tool from LinkedIn showing you different aspects of the platform and how well you stack in them.
There are many ways to improve your score that will in turn have an impact on your networking efforts.
After reading this guide, get ready to skyrocket your SSI and get even more out of LinkedIn.
