As you navigate the LinkedIn platform, you may be wondering if you’re utilizing it to its fullest ability. As B2B professionals, we know how nice it is to see data so we can use facts to aid our actions. Well, LinkedIn knows this, too, and has created the Social Selling Index.
What is the Social Selling Index?
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index tells you how capable you are of selling on the platform. This performance indicator helps you track your sales efforts’ effectiveness on the platform. You’ll want to check your score if you have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription.
How LinkedIn Scores You
LinkedIn breaks its SSI score into four different categories:
- Establish your personal brand
- Find the right people
- Engage with insights
- Build relationships
Each is scored on a scale of 1-25. Your score is measured on a daily basis and shows you how it differs from the week prior.
So if you go on vacation to the Bahamas, you may notice your score drop a bit! But there’s no need to worry – you can bring it back once you’re active again.
To get your score, click this link in a browser that is logged into your LinkedIn!
A Breakdown of the SSI dashboard
Your dashboard is pretty straightforward. There are three important things to check:
- Your overall SSI score and its breakdown
- Your industry’s average overall SSI score
- Your network’s average overall SSI score
These data points give you great insight into your competitors and peers. Now let’s take a look at the components that make up your Social Selling Index score, and how you can prioritize boosting your score in each.
Establishing your personal brand
This section of your score measures how complete your personal profile is. It also takes the quality of the content you post into account. Quality can be tracked by engagement from your network.
How to boost this aspect of your score:
The easiest way to raise your score in this section is to have a complete profile. Make sure you have a banner photo, profile picture, about section, and experience section, If applicable, fill out as many sections as you can. Recommendations, publications, skills, certifications, education, etc.
You should also be posting meaningful posts from your page. This gets you on people’s timelines, so people are aware that you are active on LinkedIn. The more consistent comments and likes on your posts, the better.
Finding the Right People
This section of your score measures how well you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other LinkedIn search tools. It also tracks your connection rate and how actively you send connection requests.
How to boost this aspect of your score:
The easiest way to “find the right people” is to actively use Sales Navigator. You should be sending connection requests on a consistent basis. The higher your connection rate, the higher this aspect of your SSI is bound to be. So the more relevant connections you send, the better.
To boost your connection rate, send requests to people within your ideal target audience. Be sure to make efficient use of Sales Navigator’s filters to ensure efficient use of your connection requests.
Engaging with Insights
This section is scored based on the content that you repost and share. In LinkedIn’s words, they are looking for you to discover and share conversation-worthy updates.
How to boost this aspect of your score:
When you scroll through your timeline and see a post that resonates with you, engage with it! Repost it, like it, and comment on it. Reposting content will help you establish your brand while engaging with others’ content. Two birds with one stone!
The more you interact with others’ posts, the more likely it is that they will interact with yours. This will raise your score and get you interacting with your network, which brings us to our next category.
Building Relationships
This section measures how often you are engaging with your network overall. It considers how often you direct message people and how high your response rate is.
How to boost this aspect of your score:
HyperSocial knows how important it is to build relationships. And this SSI factor endorses that. You can get your score up in this category by sending more direct messages that get responses.
Your response rate plays a part in this aspect of the scoring, not just how many messages you send. So it’s important to send people thoughtful messages and not spam their inboxes with a sales pitch.
So as you can see, all four factors are connected.
To establish your personal brand, you need to be engaging with insights.
To build relationships, you need to be finding the right people.
The more you engage with content, the more relationships you build.
The more you build your personal brand, the more “right” people will engage with your content. It’s all connected!
Does your SSI score really matter?
Yes, it does. Your score is not public, so no one will be able to see how you rank. But seeing the breakdown of your score shows you where you can improve on LinkedIn. Then you can focus your efforts on that and promote your business more efficiently.
To be clear, your SSI does not determine your success at social selling. But it does promote best practices that aid in creating sales opportunities for your business. The higher your score, the better position you are in to be selling on the platform.
HyperSocial can Help you with All This and More
HyperSocial’s goal is to help B2B businesses to humanize their outreach while keeping a positive presence on LinkedIn. We prioritize building relationships above all else.
Check out more about it here!
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