LinkedIn was founded in 2002 by Reid G. Hoffman, an American social networking company. With more than 100 million users worldwide, the company’s website allows members to create accounts to showcase, share expertise, expand career-related social networks, and perform social selling on LinkedIn.
Social Selling on LinkedIn for Advertisers
LinkedIn allows advertisers to select a target audience: by job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size, or LinkedIn Group. Control costs by setting a budget for your advertising and pay only for the clicks or impressions you receive.
Advertisement initialization content
- The website’s URL
- Ad title/headline (up to 25 characters).
- Ad copy (up to 75 characters)
- Representative banner image/video (standard size is 50×50 pixels)
- Attached is the information about the target group introduced above.
- We export ad statistics data periodically once a week.
- Sign up for advertising for at least 1 month. (Payment and acceptance of the contract by month.)
- The waiting time for censorship of advertising campaigns on LinkedIn is 24 hours. To ensure the banner display time on the right day, customers should register to use the service 24 hours in advance for the best results.
How can personal branding attract more sales? This starts with developing routine activities and appropriate interactions. LinkedIn is one of the great tools that allow you to connect with influencers and potential customers.
In today’s agile economy, it all boils down to standing out in the marketplace and cultivating relationships using reliable methods. Here are a few ways to make your personal brand attract more connections on LinkedIn to increase sales and create more opportunities.
3 Tips to increase your LinkedIn sales
The first way to start branding is through editing; a professional profile/profiles will help attract new connections. As you join and interact directly with professional groups and share information, your company will begin to gain experience with the following strategies:
- Start with a marketing plan — If you have the budget, use LinkedIn’s strategy of taking advantage of paid advertising. These features will help you go deeper than just communicating through InMail and help you build relationships a lot faster than the traditional way.
- Stay in touch with the network – Once your brand has made good connections, it’s time to nurture them with updates, new information, special events, and more. Use InMail to target specific individuals with a non-sales approach and provide additional solutions to their problems.
- Post every day – Repost from your blog to LinkedIn Publisher or sharing articles from your website. With a catchy title and a good summary, your brand can attract more comments and feedback that will help direct them to your products or services.
As selling through social media becomes more and more popular, personal brands will have more opportunities to build good and trustworthy relationships with the people who will become your customers on LinkedIn. Check-in every day of the week and stay in touch with the network so you can attract more interested people.
✅ See also: learn how to earn from linkedin: Earn up to 15000$ per year
What is Social Selling Index on LinkedIn?
The SSI refers for Social Selling Index.
Social Selling Index is the index that LinkedIn grants based on the positioning that a person has as a personal brand for the rest of the users. In other words, the position it occupies in people’s minds.
This is an important number for anyone interested in doing business on LinkedIn. This process is made up of four factors that measure the effectiveness of your personal brand on LinkedIn:
➡️ Complete profile
The SSI index takes into account whether your profile on LinkedIn is complete or not. Your account is your online presence on the platform.
➡️ Target of interest
Have located people related to your industry or brand positioning. Communicate with professionals in your sector.
➡️ Your activity on LinkedIn
Your interaction on LinkedIn is also another factor, in addition to creating engaging, relevant content on a daily basis and track them.
➡️ Professional relations
Build relationships with other professionals with similar goals. Engage with other people’s content by commenting on their posts or sharing their content in your LinkedIn feed.
How is the Social Selling Index on LinkedIn calculated?
The value of the Social Selling Index corresponds to the sum of 4 components, each rated from 1 to 25. I list these below, with actions to take to improve your score. Keep in mind that the SSI is updated once a week. So you have to be patient to see the impact of your new habits.
1- Build your professional brand
To improve your Social Selling Index score, Linkedin offers to:
- complete your profile with the client in mind ( this is a good start )
- visually enhance your profile to position yourself as a thought leader.
- increase your visibility by posting content and interacting
- get recommendations for skills and expertise from your colleagues and clients
2- Find the right people
To improve your Social Selling Index score, Linkedin offers to:
- Search for potential leads via groups and news
- take advantage of “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?”»
- use Linkedin’s powerful search engine to find decision-makers
- use personalized invitations to expand your network
3- Exchange information
To improve your Social Selling Index score, Linkedin offers to:
- Share relevant resources to strengthen relationships
- stay in people’s minds with recent content versus industry data and news
- participate in discussions where your contacts are active
- personalize your messages
4- Build relationships
To improve your Social Selling Index score, Linkedin offers:
- connect to contacts in your network and prospects
- keep the focus on THE decision makers (not just one per account, but several)
- connect with your colleagues and use TeamLink (Premium feature) to optimize your efforts
- cultivate your relationships over time to stay in people’s minds
✅See also: Read about LinkedIn Business Page Best Practices: 5 Ways to Improve your LinkedIn Profile
FAQ Questions about Social Selling on LinkedIn
Is the Social Selling Index useful?
The answer is yes. Social Selling Index is useful but you have to understand the logic behind it.
The objective of offering this index to everyone is obvious: to create awareness and curiosity about the Sales Navigator account. Their promise: Using Sales Navigator can increase your SSI by 20% in 6 months.
What you must remember:
- The SSI is an index that you’re doing something (but not necessarily that you’re doing it well) – it’s an activity index.
- The cost to use Sales Navigator for 6 months exceeds 500$CAD / 400€ plus applicable taxes.
- A bigger SSI does not guarantee more sales (my opinion…and feedback from several people over the years). But if you use LinkedIn well, you’ll have sales and a bigger SSI.
Is it appropriate to sell on LinkedIn?
Yes, it is one of the best platform for generating new B2B sales leads. You must have it as part of your digital and social selling strategy.
The closer your LinkedIn Social Selling Index – SSI score is to 100, the better you’re doing on LinkedIn. It is highly recommended by LinkedIn to have a social selling index – SSI score of greater than 75 to stand out in the crowd.
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile with your information and keyword.
- Target your LinkedIn connections.
- Publish quality content on a daily and weekly basis.
- Ask with your prospect and connection for getting credibility and trust.
- Don’t copy others, and try your unique technique
✅See also: How to Register Linkedin Accounts for businesses?
The 4 pillars of social selling are:
1. Create a professional brand
2. Find your potential buyers
3. Engage them with insights
4.Work on building business relationships
Practice each term of these Social Selling Index pillars on LinkedIn and other channels for growing your business. After all, finding an effective channel like LinkedIn is essential and ideal to achieve success as it facilitates to reach your global audience, contact them, send them messages, sell them a product or service, let them identify your brand, grow your companies and more!
✅See also: What Is LinkedIn? Why Should I Have A LinkedIn Account?