There are a lot of different factors that make up your LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score. The main four are establishing your brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships. If you want to improve your SSI score you need to work on all four of these elements.
Getting Started
In order to improve your SSI score, you need to first figure out what your score is right now. Learning your current score will show you the areas that need improvement and what you are currently doing right. Don’t forget that the score is all based on your social selling performance. So the score will be heavily based on your activity on Linkedin’s platform and your ability to create relationships.
| You can check your score anytime by typing in LinkedIn.com/sales/ssi in your browser |
The Four Components of LinkedIns Social Selling Index
1. Establish your professional brand
“Complete your profile with the customer in mind. Become a thought-leader by publishing meaningful posts.”
The first component is all about you. It’s your cover image, profile photo, title and summary. To improve this score you need to ensure you are keeping your profile updated and filling your page with important information all about you and your brand. A professional headshot and branded cover image is proven to increase engagement on your page. Updating your page and having more users interact with your page will increase your professional brand score on the SSI.
2. Find the right people
“Identify better prospects in less time using efficient search and research tools.”
Linkedin is proud of its ability to grow networks and prospecting. So finding the right people by proficiently using LinkedIn search tools will help you gain a higher score within the “Find the right people” section. All you need to do is search, filter, connect. If you’re using LinkedIn’s premium tools such as Sales Navigator this process will be easier, with a greater ability to target the right people you want to do business with.
3. Engage with insights
“Discover and share conversation-worthy updates to create and grow relationships.”
There are a variety of ways to improve your Engage with Insights Score on LinkedIn. Likes, Comments and Shares both giving and receiving will improve your SSI score. As a form of engagement with the platform the more there is the better your score will be. You can use LinkedIn’s insights to check your performance. Just as the Social Selling Index is a tool to gain an insight into your social selling performance, there are a variety of data tools available. You can see who’s viewed your profile, who is viewing your content and how many times you’ve appeared within the search options. You can delve even further into these options to see what industry, position and location these searches and views appear in. Regularly checking these updates will allow you to tailor your approach better or keep up the activity that is yielding the best results for you.
4. Build relationships
“Strengthen your network by finding and establishing trust with decision-makers.”
Building relationships is quite straightforward and you can improve your score within this section by improving your total number of connections, having a strong number of senior-level connections and having a good acceptance rate.
4 Simple Ways to Improve Your SSI Score are: updating your page, checking your insights, liking and commenting on user posts and messaging your connections.
It’s worth noting that all the activity on the SSI proves you are being active on the platform, but you could just be a busy fool. If you’re using a lot of actions in order to sell and market yourself, but find your views lacking and messages ignored, the SSI can’t improve that aspect. You need a social selling strategy that overrules the social selling index and gives you the right results. You could have 100’s across the board and zero leads. But, improving your score whilst refining your strategy will help keep you motivated to use LinkedIn to its fullest potential. Don’t get caught up in the numbers, but use them to guide you to taking action.
