LinkedIn continues to grow its active users in 2020. If ever there is a right time for you to get serious about your LinkedIn, it’s now. So, today, I’d like to write about one of the most interesting social selling data metrics provided by the LinkedIn name called LinkedIn SSI score.
SSI is the abbreviation used for Social Selling Index. Have you ever heard about the term LinkedIn SSI score before? What are your opinions on LinkedIn SSI? Some folks call it a beneficial and valuable metric to measure your performance and execution on LinkedIn, while others call it a totally useless and a vanity metric. Well, let me stop confusing you guys with these rapid questions! If you guys have no idea about LinkedIn SSI, No Worries! Because today in this post, I’m gonna discuss all the key information about LinkedIn SSI, and how you can use them if you wish to do so. Keep reading and discover more!
What Does the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) Score Signify?
Back in October 2014, LinkedIn rolled out the new social selling measurement called LinkedIn’s SSI score. LinkedIn SSI is an algorithmic solution metric for sales and the significant measure of a company’s or individual’s adaptation to the four major pillars of social selling on LinkedIn, based on a measurement range of 0 to 100.
The index and ranking of LinkedIn SSI happen based on your organization’s or your individual activity around the four pillars of social selling. Performance in each of the four pillars is evaluated, and the collected score will become your LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index rank. 25 is the maximum score for each pillar and as per the LinkedIn statement, the LinkedIn SSI is a measurement of a person’s or organization’s social selling skills and execution on LinkedIn.
The more relevant and insightful activities you have around the four pillars of SSI, the higher you can score in your SSI score. Basically, the LinkedIn SSI score fosters exactly how organizations or individuals should engage and interact with their prospects on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn SSI score is created to help you gain visibility and awareness into your personal or your company’s activities on LinkedIn, help you to discover new opportunities and breakthroughs, and lets you benchmark your score against your fellow peers and competitors.
Here you can find your LinkedIn SSI Score
The Most Important Four Pillars of LinkedIn SSI
As I discussed earlier, The LinkedIn SSI score calculates you or your company’s performance and execution in four major areas and they’re known as the four pillars of LinkedIn SSI. The four pillars of SSI include:
1) Create a Professional Brand
2) Find the Right People
3) Engage with Insights
4) Build Strong Relationships
Let us have a brief look at these four pillars and their key metrics one by one.
1) Create a Professional Brand
Under this category, LinkedIn looks into the key factors such as have you set an altogether completed and professional-looking LinkedIn profile that includes a relevant cover photo? How many LinkedIn posts have you created on your own and Published? How many page views are you generating through your LinkedIn posts? How many connections and followers have you gained on LinkedIn so far? Then based on these measurements’ results, you will get your SSI score for Create a Professional Brand.
Tips to create a professional brand to boost your SSI Score
- Complete Your Profile: You should complete your LinkedIn profile 100% in a way that strengthens your industry credibility and builds trust. While building your profile professionally, you also get to know what the LinkedIn profile building mistakes are to avoid.
- Use Multimedia: Use rich multimedia content in your LinkedIn profile such as videos, images, and presentations to make it more attractive and relevant.
- Get Endorsements: Aim to increase the endorsements and recommendations for your skills and expertise.
- Create Long-Form Posts: Publish long-form posts with regular intervals to share your expert knowledge and skills.
2) Find the Right People
When it comes to your LinkedIn connections, the numbers count doesn’t matter, the actual value is in the meaningful connections with the right people. That’s why LinkedIn wants you to connect effectively with the prospects by finding their lead builder system and reaching out to them with relevant insights. To calculate your SSI score for this pillar, LinkedIn analyses the value and effectiveness of your LinkedIn connections and relationships, so, it’s really worth getting the right connections for your sales and your SSI score.
Tips to find the right people to boost your SSI score
- Become Proactive: Make yourself actively visible in your prospect searches on LinkedIn or in Sales Navigator.
- Connect with the Right People: As I said earlier when it comes to LinkedIn connections, the number doesn’t matter, the actual value is the meaningful connections you have. Therefore, use filter criteria like skills, role, or seniority to find the right potential prospect profiles.
- Follow Up People: Check up and engage with the people who have viewed your LinkedIn profile.
- Keep Track of Your Progress: Save the details and progress of your sales generation in Sales Navigator or Lead Builder.
3) Engage with Insights
Find and share valuable and beneficial information through your LinkedIn posts to cultivate new relationships or to maintain the existing relationships on LinkedIn. This particular pillar measures your engagements on LinkedIn, in terms of the number of likes, comments, and shares your LinkedIn posts are receiving. When you succeed to make effective engagement then you will gain more than a rise in your SSI score; it will contribute to creating lead relationships and building long-term credibility with your LinkedIn audiences as a whole.
Tips to engage with insights to boost your SSI
- Everyday Engage: Take 10 minutes in your day to like and comment on relevant content on LinkedIn.
- Share Content: Put yourself as an expert by sharing relevant content and industry-related news through your LinkedIn posts.
- Reach Out People: Actively engage with your community by commenting on relevant status, updates, and discussions. Also, keep in mind your engagement should be problem-solving rather than selling.
- Join Groups: Find out your industry niche groups on LinkedIn and actively engage in group discussions.
- Use InMail: Send InMail messages to relevant people and make sure to reply to the responses you received on your LinkedIn posts to maintain the relationships.
- Build Strong Connections: Connect and follow your prospects, current customers, and competitors to build your own community on LinkedIn.
4) Build Strong Relationships
This fourth pillar measures how successful you are at developing and growing your network on LinkedIn to not only reach direct prospects, but also those who can introduce you to your potential prospects. These relationships building should be based on trust and solving the pain points of your connections.
Tips to build strong trusted relationships to boost your SSI score
- Expand Your Network: Use LinkedIn to connect internally with your colleagues, co-workers, and to connect with your prospects after introductions.
- Connect with Decision Makers: In LinkedIn, the strength of your connections counts. Thus, it focuses on connecting with strong-status individuals and decision-makers.
- Use InMail: Contact your prospects through your sincere and realistic InMail Messages and begin a relationship with them.
- Ask for Connections: Don’t be afraid to ask for connections. Just ask your mutual connections to introduce you to your valuable prospects.
- Avoid Overdo: Focus your efforts on connecting with relevant people rather than sending mass messages to everyone on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn calculates and defines your SSI score by measuring your performance and execution in each of the above four sections on LinkedIn and based on the results you will receive your SSI rank. LinkedIn recently tweaked its metrics to make the SSI score more relevant and predictive. While incorporating the new techniques LinkedIn has established itself as a podium for the users to socially sell. New features involve adding activities through your Sales Navigator to increase your SSI, adding metrics that evaluate quality as well as quantity of your performance, and linking publishing platform activities to make more effective SSI measures.
How Important and Valuable is Your LinkedIn SSI Score?
Lot of people often asked me like ” How to improve my LinkedIn SSI score? “. To be fair, I only use these data metrics to analyze my activities on LinkedIn, I don’t bother about it but not my clients and circle. LinkedIn says that the higher score the user gains on SSI, the more successful and effective that the person or firm is at accomplishing their respective goals on sales. For instance, they say that exceptionally active users on LinkedIn get 45% more sales opportunities for them, 51% of LinkedIn users are more likely to achieve their own sales quotas without many efforts and 80% of LinkedIn users have become more productive on their LinkedIn activities.
While the LinkedIn SSI score is not an assurance of improvement in your sales success, it does make a strong and valuable connection between your certain networking activities on LinkedIn, give rise to your sales opportunities and let you effectively reach out to your potential prospects. Having said that all, it’s still up to you to discover and use the tools that help you to grow your sales and business while keeping track of which activities are actually producing the results you’re desired to get.
What Benefits Can You Obtain from Your LinkedIn SSI Score?
From your LinkedIn SSI score ranking, you can easily measure and define how good you are doing in building your LinkedIn profile to attract the right kind of people to nurture your connections and network on LinkedIn while emerging and growing yourself as a thought leader in your chosen area of expertise. As you complete your professional-looking LinkedIn profile with the target audience in your mind and publish meaningful and insightful posts on LinkedIn, your professional brand score on LinkedIn SSI will begin to rise.
You can be taught how to find your better prospects in less amount of time by utilizing the benefit of LinkedIn’s profile search function, and you can easily find the right people to reach out to by using this functionality.
Publishing relevant and insightful content on LinkedIn can help you to establish yourself as a trusted source of insights. it’s also crucial to engage yourself through likes and comments with relevant insights from others as well. Likewise, you can get yourself to participate in relevant and meaningful discussions with those people in your network and industry and in the groups’ discussions that you are a member of.
Boost and build your network stronger by connecting and building trustful relationships with decision-makers. You can build a meaningful and more valuable network by efficiently connecting with your contacts. This kind of networking gives you greater influence in discovering your new prospects, as well as getting your foot in the door of your prospective clients.
How Do You Improve and Better Your LinkedIn SSI Score?
There are numerous things you can do to enhance your SSI score on LinkedIn, Like, completing your professional-looking LinkedIn profile with your target audience in mind, share your skills and expertise through your valuable posts and insights that showcase to others what value you can bring to the table and why you would be the right fit to offer the solutions for the professional needs in your niche market. With that said, here’re some of the effective ways to improve your LinkedIn SSI,
1. Establishing and Building Your LinkedIn SSI
Once you calculate the results of your LinkedIn SSI score, you can easily see what areas of the four pillars you need to focus for more improvements. Once you get a groundline of where you’re standing in your SSI rank, then you know exactly in which areas you need to concentrate. You can track your SSI score regularly on a weekly basis to find out whether you are getting improvements or not and measure how good you are doing compared to your peers in the industry and network.
2. Create Your Professional Persona on LinkedIn
You perhaps know what a buyer persona is, hence if you’re on LinkedIn, you may as well try to establish a persona that highly relates to your ideal colleagues, customers, clients, or employers. You can also try to look at your own profile from the perspective of those people: See would they really be drawn to your profile and would they be willing to engage with you? Does your profile look ready to send them a quick message? Also, pay attention to the completion rate for a fully established profile on LinkedIn to ensure you fill out your profile perfectly without any left out.
3. Leverage the potential benefits of LinkedIn Tools
Take the full benefit of the free tools on LinkedIn to get to know how well you’ve built your profile on LinkedIn, use those tools to give and receive professional endorsements, recommendations, and congratulate connections. You can also share industry-specific content by using the tools like LinkedIn blogging, video tools, and SlideShare, all of these tools are extremely effective and efficient tools to utilize for building your credibility and authority on LinkedIn.
4. Avoid Using Automate
Apparently, we need to use automation tools to build and manage connections on LinkedIn via communications and interactions for the purpose of targeting our potential customers whether this is something we’re doing for another firm or for ourselves. But, when we’re too automated, we become less personal. So, avoid using automated tools or social bots for all your socializing purposes and try to write personalized messages to build specific connections. The very important point is here to be noted is being yourself in your interactions with people.
5. Build High-Quality Connections
It doesn’t actually matter how many followers you have on LinkedIn, what matters more is the quality of your connections. Because the right people will be more delighted to lead you towards greater opportunities, whether this is engaging you as a potential worker or a skillful colleague.
A good rule of thumb is to follow here is to contact and connect with people that you feel you genuinely like to mingle with! It may seem so clear, but sometimes we get so caught up in what other people are doing that we automatically follow their footprints without our understanding. So, before sending a connection request, ask yourself whether you really want to connect with that person, or the specific connection adds any value for you.
LinkedIn groups are another great way to gauge not only to connect with the true professionals in your industry but with the people who are respectful and helpful about the network and community.
Is LinkedIn’s SSI Score Just a Metric of Vanity?
People address LinkedIn’s SSI score as an ultimate vanity metric use up in the social selling world. As some people like to wear their LinkedIn SSI score proudly as a sign of honor and attaining a score above 80 on LinkedIn SSI is actually thought of as a “Great Achievement.”
In my opinion, it’s totally up to you to decide whether you want to consider it as an ineffective vanity metric or want to use this SSI score to develop and grow your ongoing dedication to daily activities and interactions on LinkedIn.
What to Concentrate on and What not to Bother on Your LinkedIn SSI Score?
Some of my folks use to ask this question to me, “What should I concentrate on regarding the LinkedIn SSI score and what can I overlook?”
As you can see, all four pillars are interconnected in defining the overall score of LinkedIn SSI, so, it’s not possible that any of them can be ignored or overlooked when you’re resolute to build a respectable SSI score on LinkedIn. If you’re a bit serious about LinkedIn then at least you have to consider the first pillar – Creating your professional brand – as the foundation, even if you’re not that much concerned with the other three pillars. I’ve seen many LinkedIn users build their perfect professional-looking LinkedIn profile, establish their professional brand on LinkedIn and after that, they do very little, but still score well in their SSI. If you ask me, I’d say LinkedIn users who are really serious about their professional brand and connections on LinkedIn will sure, want to engage in all the four pillars of SSI to emerge themselves as thought leaders within their LinkedIn community.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the starting of the blog, the usefulness of LinkedIn SSI continues to be a topic of debate, and our community seems pretty much evenly divided on this debate. Apart from all these debates around SSI, the question is actually for your own self: Where do your own thoughts stand? Is LinkedIn SSI a tool you use effectively or are you willing to use it? If you are using it currently, what are you going to do to boost your LinkedIn SSI score, and will it help you to improve and grow your social selling success with your current clients and prospects?
While you’re finding your answers to these above questions, if you get the feeling that your SSI score is lacking or you just want to use LinkedIn more effectively, I hope this article will help you to improve your use of LinkedIn by boosting your LinkedIn SSI score.
It’s time to hear from you! Let me know your thoughts on LinkedIn SSI in the comment box below!
