LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for selling products or services especially with the LinkedIn SSI score explained in this blog post. This process of selling through social networks is actually called Social Selling. LinkedIn lends itself perfectly to this, and the latter even launched Sales Solutions several years ago. It is a set of Social Selling tools that rely on our contact databases within the network. The Social Selling Index or SSI score is one of them, and it is accessible to everyone. Find out what your SSI is and how to use it to optimize your presence on LinkedIn!
What is the LinkedIn SSI meaning and how LinkedIn SSI score explained?
First of all, this is the question that everyone asks, what the SSI score, what is it? It is an indicator that LinkedIn gives you to judge the effectiveness of your actions on the network. Concretely, LinkedIn grades you on the way you use the network. The higher your score, the more chance you have, according to them, of “imposing your personal brand,” finding the right people,” “communicating the right information,” or “building good relations.”
How is the LinkedIn SSI score explained calculated?
The score that you will be able to see displayed on your screen is calculated on the basis of 4 pillars, which have a lot of influence on Social Selling:
- Establishing your personal brand
- No need to be a LinkedIn or Social Selling expert to realize that Personal Branding has an important place on this network today. Developing your brand image around your personality and values is a practical, meaningful, and very natural way to promote your products or services. Obviously, the Social Selling Index algorithm is sensitive to this since it will significantly help you to engage and convert on the network.
- Finding the right people
- This is a relatively central notion of LinkedIn: the network. Basically, one of LinkedIn’s objectives is also to develop its professional network in quantity, of course, but also quality. The SSI score algorithm is rather attentive to the people you will add, depending on your area of expertise. It doesn’t make sense if you only have accounting experts in your network when you are a landscaper. LinkedIn also offers a very advanced search engine to find precisely the people you are looking for, whether they are prospects or not.
- Exchanging information
- On LinkedIn, it’s more than just developing your personal brand and having the right people in your network. To involve your audience, you must also be as relevant as possible, with quality, original posts.
- Building relationships
- We were talking just above about finding the right people, that’s good, but you also have to create a bond with them. Connecting with your “close friends” is essential, but LinkedIn is also interested in circles that are a little further afield to see if you create a link. If you respect the previous 3 points, people will have no trouble accepting your connection requests.
✅See also: How to Register Linkedin Accounts for businesses?
What does your LinkedIn SSI score explained actually do?
All this is interesting, but what is the practical interest of the LinkedIn SSI score explained?
First, it will help you boost your results. Indeed, Social Selling is a great way to improve your sales, especially if you respect the 4 pillars mentioned above. According to LinkedIn, those who optimize their SSI are 51% more likely to reach their quotas and generate 45% more opportunities. In fact, taking action in favor of the SSI will allow you to improve your lead generation and potentially your turnover.
Afterward, your SSI will allow you to position yourself about your competitors and network. Indeed, it indicates the SSI of the other actors in your sector of activity. For your sector and your network, you will have access to the average SSI and your “Top N%” ranking. Remember that everything is relative, and being in the top 1% of a network with an average SSI of 15 is not that rewarding. However, it also means that you are probably one of the opinion leaders in your field.
Then, LinkedIn allows you to process and evaluate your work in scores and numbers, which can be challenging. You will be able to judge the evolution of your score over time and know live if what you did was good. It is possible to link this score with business objectives if relevant.
How to increase your LinkedIn SSI score explained?
For each of the pillars that make up the Social Selling Index, there are relevant actions to take to position yourself in the eyes of LinkedIn better and find more customers.
For our first pillar, around the personal brand, we must ensure that we have a top profile. A professional profile photo that looks like you, a good summary, an attractive title, highlighted content, a detailed career path, recommendations and skills validated by your peers, etc. In short, you need to have an impeccable image! This also means that you have to differentiate yourself from others to attract potential customers and that you have to optimize your presence in the LinkedIn search engine.
For the second pillar, you will have to, as we mentioned, make maximum use of the very powerful search engine that LinkedIn uses to find the people you need. You can filter by location, position, sector of activity, or even by proximity (circle of relationships). Try to add the people most likely to be interested in what you offer.
In the third pillar, it is obvious that publishing and sharing relevant information and content is necessary. In return, you will get interactions, shares, and your readers’ trust. This is important in Social Selling.
For the last pillar, we must therefore focus on building the network. It will be essential to keep a reasonable acceptance rate and not hesitate to offer services directly by message when adding (subtly). For example, you can provide a free audit, premium content, etc. It’s an often decisive first step that will create a real link between you and your potential buyer. Of course, it’s not just that. You have to maintain all of this over time by continuing to offer content corresponding to the sales funnel’s different purchase phases.
✅See also: How to create the perfect LinkedIn profile to earn from LinkedIn?
How to use the LinkedIn SSI score explained?
To use the LinkedIn SSI score explained:
1- Motivate yourself and your team
Would you like to establish healthy competition within your sales team?
Nothing like the Social Selling Index. Indeed, the SSI is a very simple score to retrieve and understand.
If you follow what I have often suggested by asking your reps to practice social selling, then tracking this score is ideal.
For example, put up a small board on the wall in your offices or a Google Docs with:
- Online the name of one of the sales reps.
- And in the column, his Social Selling Index score of the month.
Optionally, add this score’s progress to your team’s numerical objectives, and you can also associate it with a hardship.
If this is a big step for you, start with a friendly little competition without stakes in the team: “I will pay lunch at the restaurant to the person who increases his SSI by 5 points by the end of the month! “
On a personal basis, or if you are alone in your company to be commercial, apply the same approach to give yourself a unique objective. For example, aim for an SSI of 50 at Christmas and 75 next summer!
It’s like for sport. If you don’t set a clear goal (walking 18 km in less than 3 hours in my case), it’s less easy to motivate yourself 🙂
2- Optimize your Social Selling approach
As you have seen, the Social Selling Index also includes 4 themes.
Because, in the end, improving your SSI isn’t just a game. It’s, above all, done to generate leads for your business!
Among the 4 themes, the 2 that are the most important are the construction of your professional brand and your ability to establish relationships.
Building your professional brand guarantees visibility on LinkedIn.
This is the sinews of war in a Content Marketing strategy on LinkedIn. Indeed, your profile and your LinkedIn content must be visible to as many people as possible.
Building relationships is a prospecting approach.
It’s basic. But by building relationships, you’re simply adding potential customers to your LinkedIn network.
I advise you to work on these 2 parameters with the right actions recommended by LinkedIn in the corresponding presentations.
3- Measure yourself against your market and your competitors
Admittedly, the SSI score does not give details about your competitors by name.
However, it gives you indications to position yourself concerning your market.
And it’s also very useful to do benchmarking like this.
Realizing that you are a little behind your competitors is a good incentive to wake up and work more (or better).
✅See also: How to Make Money on LinkedIn: Make up to 15000$ per year on LinkedIn
What are the metrics effecting the SSI – LinkedIn SSI score explained?
The Social Selling Index on LinkedIn is based on 4 main factors:
Metric 1 – Establishing your professional brand
This point on the Social Selling Index on LinkedIn is based primarily on information from your Linkedin profile. The more information you complete on your profile, your SSI score will be higher.
You have to think and reflect on your profile so that it is read and seen by potential prospects for your company’s activity. You can modify or add many elements to a profile (photos, banners, experiences, info, titles, keywords, our selection, etc.).
On its site LinkedIn also mentions, for this first factor, the fact that you have to share posts and articles that may be of interest to your target audience. With this idea of showing your prospects that you are sharing interesting content for them and not for your business.
In summary: Have the most complete LinkedIn profile by seriously filling in all possible spaces and fields on a profile.
Metric 2 – Finding the right people on LinkedIn
Here the goal is not to have a profile with the most relationships or connections but the most quality connections. That is, people who might be highly interested in your content or potential leads.
LinkedIn also refers to all of its tools to find profiles with whom to connec and also references to its paid tool LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
We can therefore say that using the basic LinkedIn search tools and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find new connections should increase your SSI score.
The acceptance rate of connection requests must also be taken into account, otherwise the notion of “finding the right people” and building quality relationships would be meaningless.
In summary: Use basic search tools and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find new connections and have a high acceptance rate of these messages or requests for additions.
Metric 3 – To exchange information
This third factor, for the calculation of the LinkedIn Social Selling Index , is based on what you share and what you post on LinkedIn. This idea of building trust and adding value with your content to become an expert in your industry.
Creating and sharing on LinkedIn seems to influence your SSI score. The idea is to create content that can interest or make your network react. The indicators seem to be the number of likes, comments and shares of your publications as well as the regularity of publication.
The Linkedin platform is also able to analyze the time you spend on a publication as well as all the clicks you can make (scrolling through a carousel, clicking on “see more”, reading comments, responding to comments …).
The phrase LinkedIn uses is: “Discover and share relevant articles to create and then cultivate relationships”
In summary: Regularly post interesting content for your network that will generate likes, shares and comments. And also interact by liking, commenting and sharing the interesting content of others.
Metric 4 – To build and maintain relationships
For this fourth factor of your SSI score, LinkedIn recommends that you do some networking. Here will therefore be taken into account your activity on LinkedIn not only on the news feed but also on your activity on groups and private messages during your discussions.
The company talks about “Strengthen your network by finding decision makers, then earning their trust”.
On other English documents from LinkedIn, we find the idea that even if you have found prospects who are not ready to buy your product/service today. That we must maintain an exchange. Maintaining this exchange will allow you to stay in the mind of the prospect when they are ready to buy or become interested in your products/services.
Reading this, we can say that LinkedIn analyzes the volume and regularity of your exchanges on LinkedIn from your messaging system. And even if you receive incoming messages in your mailbox. But also the number of times and days you are active on the platform. Learn them well to get a credit over your competitors!
How do I improve my SSI score on LinkedIn?
If you want to increase your LinkedIn rating, consider the following tips:
✅ Improve your personal brand .
Your profile should be as complete as possible. Have a good photo, logo, headline, description so they know what you do and what field you work in.
It is also important that you have recommendations and comments from other people about your skills or jobs.
Ask for references from professionals who have worked or are working with you.
✅ Build relationships.
Participate as much as possible on the LinkedIn platform: comment on posts or share other people’s content, interact in your groups or give your opinion as an expert in your field.
✅ Create engagement and build trust .
Create and share relevant content. To have the engagement and trust of your followers, you must have a certain frequency of publication and share interesting content for your audience.
✅ Make it clear that you can help other professionals .
On LinkedIn you will find many professionals and groups of people who network, join them.
Now you know what SSI is on LinkedIn and how you can improve your presence on this social network…so get to work today!
✅See also: Running ads on LinkedIn 2022: How To Run LinkedIn Ad Campaign
What is a good Social Selling Index on LinkedIn?
In view of certain shares and other screenshots of Social Selling Index , we can note that from 50/100 we position ourselves as an actor with a good SSI and therefore a person who often uses the LinkedIn platform.
A very good SSI score is above 70/100, a score like this allows you to generally rank in the Top 5% of professionals in your industry. Essentially showing that you use LinkedIn very often for yourself or your business.
Again this score is based on all of your activities on LinkedIn. Even if it can reflect good points like many shares, likes, comments of your posts or a high rate of acceptance of your requests.
The SSI remains only an indicator specific to LinkedIn, you can find customers or increase the notoriety of your activity without having a very high SSI score.
It is often mentioned an increase in the reach of your posts and content if you have a good SSI score. But here too, it is quite difficult to analyze knowing that the score criteria in themselves increase the visibility of your posts.
So is it the actions we have put in place that increase the reach of the posts or the score? No answer to this question even if I would tend to think that it is your actions and not the score which causes this boost of visibility.
Can we know the Social Selling Index of a person?
Today LinkedIn doesn’t give you the ability to see another person’s SSI scores, you can only view your own.
However, it is not sensitive data for a person or a company. If you want to know someone’s score, you can ask them directly by sending them the link to find out their SSI score.
Thinking about it, there may be a solution. As we have seen, you can know the average SSI of your network.
On this principle, if an account has only one relationship, the average will then only display the score of the person with whom you are in a relationship.
FAQ Questions about LinkedIn Social Selling Index –LinkedIn SSI score explained
What is an SSI score – LinkedIn Social Selling Index?
The Social Selling Index (SSI) measures a salesperson’s Social Selling skills and execution on LinkedIn(metrics). A priori, the higher the SSI scoring is, the greater your ability to generate leads.
What is a good SSI score?
After the LinkedIn SSI score explained, we generally find that industry leaders have an SSI score above 75 which means they are doing a great performance. In fact, they use this social media platform quite effectively and frequently.
How to increase your SSI?
LinkedIn claims that Sales Navigator can increase your Social Selling Index by 20% in 6 months. That said, it’s all about establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, posting relevant content with your ideas and beliefs, and building relationships.
Is LinkedIn SSI free?
Of course, this indicator is 100% free and available to all LinkedIn users. The higher score you get, the more successful and effective you are. The dashboard will help you determines the result.
Don’t hesitate to work more to be strong and achieve more success.
Where do I find my SSI score on LinkedIn?
To find your LinkedIn SSI score explained, you have to consult this link:
Discover your Social Selling Index ➜ Go now and check how are you performing.
Then, you have to optimize your account and categories to be in the top 1% everywhere!
