LinkedIn is one of the most rapidly growing platforms with 660 million users and 30 million companies from more than 20 countries. It presents several opportunities to connect with like-minded professionals in your industry, whether you are looking for a job or starting your own company.
That is why thousands of people worldwide have built their LinkedIn profiles and do their best to optimize said profiles to build their credibility and find connections.
It is important to note that LinkedIn is a job searching platform that also works as a social selling tool. Instead of pitching your products or services to virtual strangers, you get to attract people to your offerings by sparking conversations with them over LinkedIn.
An important metric for assessing the effectiveness of your brand is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index. It demonstrates how you position your brand, build meaningful relationships and engage with the right people.
This article offers an overview of LinkedIn’s social selling index score and how you can improve it to enhance your social selling efforts.
A Quick Introduction To The LinkedIn SSI Score
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index is the measure of how efficiently you have created a professional brand presence on the social site. It also considers how you got in touch with relevant people, shared valuable insights, and built meaningful relationships.
Your performance in each of these four pillars is measured and then compiled to create your Social Selling Index ranking. The score encapsulates a salesperson’s social selling skills and performance.
According to LinkedIn, as a salesperson’s social selling index rises, they also experience significant sales growth. It is important to note that your SSI ranking is measured and updated daily, which offers you the opportunity to improve your social selling efforts.
If you position yourself as a knowledgeable professional by sharing helpful content with your network, your SSI score rises. LinkedIn reports that social selling leaders get 45% better results and create 45% more opportunities than professionals with lower SSI. Moreover, 78% of social sellers beat their counterparts who do not use social media.
How To Find Your SSI?
If you are curious about your LinkedIn SSI, here’s what you need to do.
Log in to LinkedIn, head over to their sales solutions page, and click on “Get your score free.”
It will direct you to your LinkedIn Social Selling Index dashboard to see your profile’s score to gauge where you stand from others in the network.
This overall score is composed of the four key elements that range from 0 to 25 for each. These are:
- Completeness of the profile
- Ability to find and connect with the right people
- Engage with other members and available insights
- Aptitude to build professional relationships
Together, these four elements measure your social selling performance on a scale of 0 to 100.
If your overall score is between 60 and 75, your content has an average reach. But if your score is below 60, the reach is even below average. The higher the SSI score you have, the higher your reach is and the more their performance.
One of the key components of a successful social media strategy is making sure that your content is reaching as many people as possible. A high SSI score indicates that your content is being seen by a lot of people, which means that it has a good chance of being shared and liked.
Here’s How You Can Improve Your Social Selling Index (SSI)
Here are four tips that will help you improve your SSI score and get better sales and career opportunities as a result.
Social Selling Index Tip #1: Elevate Your Personal Brand With A Complete LinkedIn Profile
Your brand depicts who you are, your qualifications, and your skills. To build your brand, you need to ensure that your LinkedIn profile is complete. It means filling out all the profile sections that include the heading, summary, and experience.
Post a profile picture and ask for endorsements to prove your skills and knowledge as a professional in a specific industry. Ensure that all the endorsements are relevant to your industry by posting the top three skills you want people to endorse.
Moreover, to enhance your brand, you can include multimedia-rich content such as slides and videos that increases engagement.
Social Selling Index Tip #2: Connect With The Right People
Most professionals on LinkedIn think that connecting with people is enough to grow their network. But to increase your SSI score, you need to identify the right prospects and connect with them.
For that, you need to carry out advanced people searches to filter and search for relevant people from your industry. Also, don’t just search and connect with the person but view their profile to demonstrate your enthusiasm for getting in touch with them.
You can also look at your third-degree connections’ profiles to find better prospects. It ensures that you are active on your profile as LinkedIn observes your number of active days.
Social Selling Index Tip #3: Share Insights And Valuable Information
To build credibility among your network, you need to increase engagement, which is achievable by sharing conversation-worthy updates and information. Follow the relevant topic hashtags of your industry to see the latest news and updates.
You can also increase engagement by joining your industry-relevant groups and initiating conversations or by commenting and sharing other people’s posts.
It is because all these elements serve as ranking factors by LinkedIn. Therefore, you need to incorporate these strategies in your daily routine to build trust with your network and, in turn, enhance your SSI rankings.
Moreover, connecting with a person make your connection request more personal and relevant to the person.
Social Selling Index Tip #4: Strengthen Relationships
As a salesperson, LinkedIn allows you to connect with a vast B2B buyer base to interact with them and sell your products or services.
Your LinkedIn score depends on the number of connections you have, your links with your co-workers, and how quickly you accept connection requests.
That is why it’s essential to boost your score by engaging with decision-makers and strengthening the connection to grow your relationships with time.
In Conclusion
By enhancing your LinkedIn presence and taking advantage of the features offered by this tool, you can position your career for growth in 2021. You need to know that everything you do on this platform contributes to an increase in value so that your network view you as a credible source.
Face-to-face conversations are important with clients to sell your products or services and seal the deal. You can apply the same tactics to LinkedIn and enhance your SSI index.
The key to maintaining or improving your SSI scores is to be consistent in your efforts and devote some time every day to connect with your network.
Are you ready to increase your reach on LinkedIn?
Our LinkedIn advertising can create and execute original social posts and LinkedIn ads. It improves your prospects of landing better clients, more significant connections, and more sales. Book a free consultation with Noah Digital to learn more and improve your SSI score.
