The integration of social networks like Facebook and Instagram are attractive for most marketers. The ability to gather exposure for a brand or product organically has allowed exponential growth in the e-commerce space with firms gathering demand through greater use of social media content marketing. This even includes platforms like TikTok. Real salespeople, however, know that LinkedIn is where the action really is. Home to professionals from all over the globe, it’s become a haven for brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. Yet, it’s surprising how few people have heard of LinkedIn SSI, or LinkedIn social selling index despite its wide accessibility.

In this article we’ll have a look at SSI. What is it? What does it mean? How to access and use it for your own brand.

What is Social Selling?

Essentially, LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index helps you identify, measure and tailor your advertising and exposure. The LinkedIn SSI score tells you how successful you have been at developing your brand, whether a company or your individual’s adaptation of the four pillars of selling on LinkedIn, based on a scale of 0 to 100.

Social selling, the act of utilising social media as a sales space can include the use of any social network, not just LinkedIn. For most, LinkedIn represents the benchmark social network tool for B2B sales as this is where personal brands, professional development and leadership are most valued.

How to beat the LinkedIn SSI score

LinkedIn launched its SSI service back in 2014, with the aim of measuring how successful you are at developing your brand. Clearly, this directly assesses how well a marketer does its job. Whether you own your business, want to develop a personal brand or need greater exposure for a particular product or service, ensuring you maintain a high SSI score can be a good indicator for success.

The four pillars making up your SSI score are each assessed up to a score of 25 each in the following:

1. Create a Professional Brand
2. Find the Right People
3. Engage with Insights
4. Build Strong Relationships

Create a Professional Brand

Here, LinkedIn looks at the fundamentals of your profile. Have you put together a complete and professional looking profile? Make sure all the different sections are filled out. LinkedIn includes pointers and hints to help you understand the next steps to undertake to make for a complete and professional looking profile.

This can include:

• Having a consistent and coherent theme for a profile and cover photo
• Partaking in LinkedIn Publisherposts
• Constantly expanding your network
• Creating and establishing articles and content relevant to your industry
• Commenting on trending topics
• Replicate industry leaders until you become one

Find the Right People

LinkedIn, as a social network, is all about people. Yet unlike other social networks, LinkedIn focuses primarily on professionals. This is a great opportunity for businesses favouring B2B sales or general brand exposure and lead generation.

Building a great network is all about connecting with the right people. Building buyer personas, understanding your consumers, clients and people of interest is the first step in networking. Making the most of the different ways you can find people relevant to your industry is essential. On LinkedIn, this can be done through:

• Using the keyword search tool
• Following industry-specific hashtags
• Commenting on relevant posts
• Interacting / engaging with market leaders
• Holding polls / quizzes & promoting audience interactions.

Engage with Insights

Key to the use of LinkedIn is its metric system. LinkedIn is beneficial to businesses attempting to grow their brand in that they are presented with a lot of information at very little to no cost. Analytics and insights about who your ideal clients are, who interacts with your posts, as well as similar people in your industry will undoubtedly help your brand tailor its services and marketing to client wants and needs.

Build Strong Relationships

Despite all your marketing efforts, LinkedIn will remain a social media platform. In that, client relationships and individuality play a central role. Whether you’re concerned about lead generation or brand awareness, you’ll want to make relationships that involve all key players of interest to your brand.

What is a good SSI score?

LinkedIn SSI is very relative. As such, the dashboard will compare you to your peers within the same industry. There is no specific perfect score that determines whether your SSI is good or not. It also depends on the goals of your brand and whether you believe achieving a higher SSI score will genuinely benefit you towards reaching your goals.

Irrespectively, you should aim to be in the top ten percent of the industry you belong to.

If this isn’t where you are currently, LinkedIn Sales Navigator claims it can boost your SSI by 20% in the span of 6 months.

Finding Your SSI Score:

We’ve established what an SSI is, what it represents, how it’s calculated and how to improve it. Now, finding out your LinkedIn SSI score is relatively simple and very quick.

Simply,

• Log in to your LinkedIn account.
• Navigate to https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi
• Enjoy

How important is it?

Having a high LinkedIn SSI score is all fun and games but does it matter? Well maybe…

LinkedIn claims that the higher the user’s score, the more successful that person or company is at reaching their sales goals. For example, highly active LinkedIn users gain 45% more sales opportunities, are 51% more likely to hit their quotas, and are 80% more productive.

Nonetheless, your goals are yours and they can only be achieved by you. Certain metrics such as SSI only aim to help guide you on the fundamentals of social influence. The SSI is valued up to the amount of value you give it. Certain influencers such as Social Selling Trainer Dave Howe calls LinkedIn’s SSI score “The ultimate vanity metric of the social selling world.”. Yet it’s commendable to achieve scores exceeding 80.

Whether you are looking for effective and efficient lead gen, brand awareness / exposure or outsourced marketing, Brighter Directions have worked in the marketing space for over 15 years with large success in industries ranging from Healthcare, Finance, Construction to Tech and Education. Get in touch with one of our marketing experts and we’ll happily provide tailored marketing solutions for content, social media, PR or white label.

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