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LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) – is it worth paying attention to or it’s just another vanity metric on LinkedIn?

Usefulness of LinkedIn Social Selling Index score remains a topic for discussion and debate in digital marketing, sales and through leadership. 

In this blog post I’ll attempt to provide a quick overview of the LinkedIn Social Selling Index and share my thoughts with you and in the end let you know about my verdict whether you want to use it to your benefit or ignore it.  

But first of all, let’s define what social selling means and what it is about. Here is how Hootsuite defines social selling:

Social selling is the art of using social media to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects. It’s the modern way to develop meaningful relationships with potential customers so you’re the first person or brand a prospect thinks of when they’re ready to buy.

Now, let’s see how LinkedIn describes its Social Selling Index:

It’s a first-of-its-kind measure of a company’s or individual’s adaptation of the four pillars of selling on LinkedIn, based on a scale of 0 to 100.

LinkedIn’s SSI score measures you, or your company’s performance in four key areas, also known as the LinkedIn SSI pillars. They are:

  1. Create a Professional Brand

  2. Find the Right People

  3. Engage with Insights

  4. Build Strong Relationships

 

Pillar #1: Create a Professional Brand

Under this pillar basically LinkedIn looks at whether you completed all of your profile sections – headline, summary and experience, included a professional photo, banner etc.

Do you share high quality, helpful and relevant content with your followers?

How many page views are your posts generating?

How many followers have you gained?

All these metrics indicate how well you create your professional brand on LinkedIn. 

Pillar #2: Find the Right People

What LinkedIn means by finding the right people is that encourages us to prospect efficiently by reaching out and connecting to relevant people and network with them.

As a result of this, everyone wins. People on the platform benefit from the right mutual connections and what these connections bring them down the road. The platform benefits from having people stay longer on LinkedIn and coming back more often. 

To increase the score for this pillar LinkedIn wants us to use their tools such as Sales Navigator. However, you can also use their basic tools and search tools by carrying out advanced search feature to filter results or carry out Boolean searches to identify the ‘right people’. View people’s profiles. Look at who’s viewed your profile.

Basically, LinkedIn wants us to use its tools and features suite. 

Pillar #3: Engage With Insights

What LinkedIn tries to achieve with this one is to encourage its users to discover and share worthy updates conversations. And, by doing so they grow relationships on the platform. 

Here are some examples of activities you can perform to increase the score of this pillar. Follow relevant industry or topic hashtags such as #SocialSelling #Accounting or #DigitalMarketing, etc. Join relevant groups and engage with them. Comment on and share other people’s posts. 

Did you know that LinkedIn not only provides ranking juice to likes, comments, and re-shares you receive but also to likes, comments, and re-shares that you give to other people. So reposting, liking and commenting on other people’s content are also a ranking factor on its own. So, be generous with liking, sharing and commenting on other people’s content. 

By the way speaking of sharing and liking, please, like this post and share on social media as well as comment down below and let me know what you think of this content. ?

Pillar #4: Build Relationships

The last pillar is all about strengthening your network by connecting and establishing trust with decision makers. Your score for this specific pillar is based upon the total number of connections including external connections, i.e. people from other companies and internal connections (your coworkers from the same company).

Also, it’s based on the acceptance rate for connection requests you send. 

All these four Social Selling Index pillars make up your social selling score on LinkedIn. 

Now let me hop on my computer and real quick go through each pillar and based on the example show you which component of Social Selling Index looks like and what it means. 

social selling index

My Verdict

Now, here is the question: 

Should you bother with this SSI Score too much or you simply ignore it? 

Well, here is what I think…

Even though I don’t suggest you to get hung up on these metrics and freak out by its decrease and checking them daily (the metric fluctuates and updates daily depending on your activities on LinkedIn), I think you still don’t want to ignore this completely. 

You want to check back from time to time and see how well you’re doing in terms of social selling score just to validate your activities are right on track on LinkedIn. 

Here is why.

LinkedIn would not come up with this tool and promote it heavily, if it was not important.  I think through this SSI index LinkedIn tries to accomplish two goals:

  1. It sets a benchmark and rules of the game for its users to know how they should be using the platform in order to keep it safe and beneficial for everyone.
  2. It gives us – the users a hint on how and when LinkedIn will reward our content by ranking and increasing its visibility provided that we abide by the rules and social selling principles.

I hope this post was useful and insightful for you. If so, give some love by sharing, liking and commenting down below and letting me know how you’re doing in terms of social selling and what your score is. 

What’s Next?

If you are a coach, consultant, trainer, speaker or author, you want to discover the faster, easier way to get prospects and sales qualified leads on LinkedIn today.

At LinkedFormula we help our clients sell their digital products and services on LinkedIn and shorten the sales cycle.

This system and processes we have at LinkedFormula can put you on track to hunt down your ideal clients relatively FAST.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can solve your lead generation problem the first step is to get the this FREE LinkedIn Guide. 

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