While there is so much debate on the validity and usefulness of the LinkedIn Social Selling Index, or SSI in short, marketers and social selling stars can’t deny the importance of this measuring tool.
It’s a very clever tool and LinkedIn claims that those who have achieved 70 percent are likely to gain 45% more opportunities and 60% more likely to hit their sales quota. LinkedIn also claims that 78% of the social sellers outperform as compared to the peers who don’t use LinkedIn.
In this guide, we will be covering:
- What is LinkedIn’s social selling index?
- What is a good LinkedIn SSI score?
- How to Calculate LinkedIn SSI?
- Breakdown of four pillars & best practices to achieve higher SSI
- Importance of LinkedIn SSI
- Conclusion
Let’s start.
What Is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score?
LinkedIn SSI is a formula, first introduced in 2014, to define how to quantify how well you have embraced social selling efforts. Your efforts are ranked from 1 to 100.
LinkedIn describes SSI as “the 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 1 to 100.”
The performance of each four pillars is analyzed and the collective score gives a user’s SSI ranking. LinkedIn says that SSI is the measurement of how well a salesperson has adopted and executed social selling practices. The maximum score for each pillar is 25 and a combined score of 70 or above means a higher number of sales.
What Is a Good LinkedIn SSI Score?
By now you’d have understood that LinkedIn SSI is a fantastic indicator of how well you have established your brand and engaged with ideal prospects. There are a total of 100 points and if you want to be a selling star, you must maintain a score value of 70 out of 80. If your SSI is below 70, you really need to work and use practices to boost your SSI score.
How LinkedIn SSI is Calculated?
LinkedIn SSI is calculated using the four social selling pillars:
- Establish Your Professional Brand: How attractive and trustworthy your LinkedIn profile is? Have you created an effective buyer persona keeping in mind the needs of customers? Are you posting personalized and relevant content to contribute value to your network?
- Finding the Right People: Are you using any filters or search tools to identify the right audience in a short time?
- Engaging With Insights: Are you engaging with your ideal prospects? Are you sharing relevant things for them or commenting on their posts for maximum engagement?
- Building Relationships: How successfully are you expanding your network and building meaningful relationships with industry leaders and decision-makers?
So, your LinkedIn SSI score is a sum of your performance in all these four areas. Recently, LinkedIn has introduced some new metrics to make your SSI even more predictive. These new metrics include adding activities that can be performed through Sales Navigator as well as publishing platform activities.
Now let’s break down all these four elements and see what hacks you can use to boost the score.
Detailed Breakdown of Four Pillars & Best Practices to Achieve Higher SSI
SSI Pillar 1. Establishing Your Professional Brand
Optimizing and creating an attractive profile should be your priority. When creating a buyer persona, make sure you keep your customers in mind.
A professional and attractive LinkedIn profile means having a good profile picture, a background photo, a relevant headline, a well-thought summary, fully completed skills and endorsement sections, and other things.
It’s very important that you complete your LinkedIn profile because it adds to your value and authenticity.
The second step is to establish your repute as a thought leader by crafting and publishing relevant and personalized content. As more people take interest in your content, your name is more likely to get familiarized.
Here are some tips to help you establish a great brand repute:
- Make sure you post highly rich multimedia content such as infographics, videos, SlideShare, etc. which bring 3x more engagement.
- Write long but relevant topics related to industry trends. If your blog is interesting and relevant, people will read it to the end. Long-form posts are more likely to get you more followers.
- Try to increase your endorsements as much as you can because it makes your profile look more trustworthy.
SSI Pillar 2. Find the Right People
This pillar is about finding the right prospects for your business in a short time using different filters and search tools.
The success of your LinkedIn lead generation also depends on how relevant your search results are. This step is very important because if you can’t find relevant people, the score of the next two pillars (engaging and building relationships) will also be less and it will impact the overall SSI score.
One of the effective ways to filter out the right people is using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It is undoubtedly the best way as it comes with highly advanced filters that help you reach exactly who you’re interested in. Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can:
- Use best filters to get precise results
- Save search results for later use
- Get recommendations
- Get alerts when the tool finds relevant profiles
You can use the following techniques to find the right people on LinkedIn:
- Use LinkedIn’s regular search filters
- Check ‘People also viewed’ as you will find many relevant prospects there.
- Search into LinkedIn groups
- Run automated outreach campaigns using LinkedIn automation tools
You can generate lists of the right prospects and run personalized campaigns using the best LinkedIn automation tools.
Why running an outreach campaign with a LinkedIn automation tool is very beneficial as you can reach out to maximum people automatically. You don’t need to find people or send them to connect requests manually.
Not just that, these tools also send personalized connect notes automatically to help you get maximum acceptance and response rate.
Another great tactic to find relevant people in one place is by targeting a particular LinkedIn post. The benefit of targeting a LinkedIn post with a high engagement rate is that you can find maximum industry-specific prospects easily. You can use the safest LinkedIn automation tool to scrape profiles who have liked or commented on the post and then assign them to a campaign.
SSI Pillar 3. Engage With Insights
Now that you have filtered out a list of the ideal prospects, the next step would be engagement. Many social sellers like to create and post personalized content and share it with their circle. If the content is interesting, prospects like and comment on it and this way, you can increase your engagement on LinkedIn.
Likewise, you can also like and comment on other people’s posts and engage in conversations to establish your reputation and become more familiarized.
This fourth pillar measures your engagement in terms of how many views, likes, and comments you’re receiving on your profile, and how much activity you are performing in your feed.
To get maximum likes and comments, many marketers and businesses use different tactics such as they share posts asking people to ‘Comment to get a particular offer.”
This way, more people show interest, and they comment on the post to see which offer they will get.
Apart from that, the engagement pillar also measures your acceptance and response rate. Sometimes people send a number of connection requests, messages, and inMails but they fail to get a significant acceptance and response rate.
This happens when you send templated messages and notes with zero personalization. In turn, it affects your overall SSI score. Thus, make sure you run highly personalized campaigns to get maximum results.
All this might seem like a lot of work, but it can be done quickly and more efficiently using the best LinkedIn automation tool. You can see how to run a successful personalized outreach campaign here.
SSI Pillar 4. Build Relationships
If you are a B2B marketer or someone associated with the marketing world, you already know how important it is to build strong relationships with prospects.
You can strengthen your network and build strong business relationships by establishing trust with the decision-makers. However, make sure you connect and build relationships with the right people.
Some marketers believe social selling is just a number game, but the truth is that it’s all about building relationships with potential clients.
For that, you need to filter out and create a list of relevant prospects. You can either do that using LinkedIn’s basic filters or by using LinkedIn Sales Navigator or any other LinkedIn automation tool of your choice.
The more industry-specific your LinkedIn prospects are, the better will be your relationships.
How exactly can you use a LinkedIn automation tool to build relationships?
You might be thinking that LinkedIn automation tools can create spam if you use them to send messages. However, we have a solution for you.
- Use LinkedIn Sales navigator to find your prospects
- Use LinkedCamp to run a highly personalized campaign for those prospects
- LinkedCamp with its Hyperise integration enables users to send highly customized images and GIFs according to the profile and data of each prospect.
The benefit of running such a personalized campaign will be that maximum prospects will respond to you and can take over the conversation to build strong business relationships.
Just like the 3rd pillar, make sure you add value to your conversation and messages. Thus, when crafting messages, try to include their personal details and interests. Don’t start selling right away. Be more genuine and relevant in your conversations.
Why LinkedIn SSI Score is Important
A better LinkedIn SSI score is important both for safety and growth purposes.
The LinkedIn algorithm is very smart, and it keeps a very close eye on what activities you’re performing in your day-to-day life.
Currently, many people are complaining about LinkedIn’s new weekly invite limits and how it is affecting their outreach and marketing efforts.
It is not implemented on all LinkedIn accounts and observation has shown that LinkedIn is targeting those accounts which have suspicious activities.
LinkedIn also keeps an eye on your SSI score, if it’s too low such as many connection requests get rejected or people flag your messages as spam, it will take action against you.
Moreover, a better SSI score means you’re more likely to connect with potential prospects and ultimately more sales.
A good SSI score is very important if you want to gain long-term social selling benefits on LinkedIn.
Working on your SSI can significantly improve your chances of finding and connecting with potential prospects and achieving your overall marketing and lead generation goals easier and faster.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful platform and there is no doubt about it. Spending 20-30 minutes daily on this platform can help you perform more activity, and your SSI score would automatically rise.
However, if you think you already have enough on your plate and don’t have time to work on these four pillars, you can always use LinkedCamp. With this tool you can:
- Establish a great brand repute
- Find the right prospects
- Engage with them
- Build healthy relationships
A great number of our users have claimed that LinkedCamp has helped them grow their SSI score overall. Want to know how it works? Book a 7-day free trial and see your SSI score increase in just a few days.
