What’s the story around LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI)?
Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) attempts to measure how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with their definition of insights, and building relationships on the social networking platform for business. It is updated daily and is what I’d categorize as a measurement of your social selling mojo. Maybe.
Let’s give the concept of social selling some context
My own definition of social selling is the marriage of content marketing and social media. Social selling is also misunderstood as navigating the sales process using tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
While social networking platforms can certainly help, social selling is mostly about building stronger relationships with potential clients, based on genuine empathy and a deep understanding of the problems they face, which you can demonstrate by the content you produce and/or share.
It’s also driven by the popular belief that anywhere from 50 to 60{60023c7b1960a5fb9dae172379ca3153ba00fa4679a2b03978f428523be766b5} of buying decisions are made before you even connect directly with a prospect. Everything is online and everyone and every company has a digital footprint, so prospects can conduct loads of research, fit checks and vetting long before they fill out your Contact Us form or send you an email.
The SSI measures how you are doing with what LinkedIn has determined to be the four key elements of social selling:
- Establishing your professional brand
- Tip: Complete your profile with the customer in mind. Become a thought-leader by publishing meaningful posts.
- Finding the right people
- Tip: Identify better prospects in less time using efficient search and research tools.
- Engaging with insights
- Tip: Discover and share conversation-worthy updates to create and grow relationships.
- Building relationships
- Tip: Strengthen your network by connecting and establishing trust with decision makers.
Similar to the “How you rank” for profile views statistic (which, IMHO, is meaningless, I advise all my clients to turn off), your SSI ranks you against your network and industry (not sure this is meaningful yet). You can also view a weekly tracking of your score – presumably to provide additional ways to track what is “working.” Something I thought of while writing this is that I can probably improve my score if I change my industry from Management Consulting to something more specific like Marketing & Advertising? (Probably not, though, since I’ll have a lot more direct competition in that classification!)
The maximum score is 100 and is made up of the four elements mentioned above (25 max points for each). If you’re logged into LinkedIn you can view your Social Selling Index via this link. (https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi/)
Here’s mine:
As you can see, and according to LinkedIn’s algorithm, I ranked fairly well within my network and industry. However, it looks as if I have some improvement to do around engaging with insights (but there’s so much link bait!) and finding the right people – hmm, something I’ve never found to be a challenge. http://amzn.to/1QLlPkb
I realize I might lose some potential new clients by saying this, but I recommend not getting too distracted by your score, well, unless it’s under 50. After all, it’s probably just another savvy LinkedIn device to try to get more people to do more on the platform in order to improve their analytics (time on site, page views, etc.), so they can charge more for their ads.
That being said, if you’re not happy with your score, check out this LinkedIn page for ways to improve it, or just contact me and we’ll schedule a private Mastering LinkedIn session focused on developing a strategy and tactics that will generate the things that really matter to you and your business, such as leads, buzz and quality connections.
Want more updates like this one or the straight scoop on loads of other SMB-related topics? Subscribe to the Making Connections Matter newsletter and get my Personal Branding Basics on LinkedIn Infographic FREE. Or, check out my ebook on Amazon titled, “LinkedIn Savvy for Small Business: How to Get More Leads, Buzz and Connecti, ns on LinkedIn.”
Note: LinkedIn’s SSI feature was previously only available to subscribers to the Sales Navigator premium account. It’s only now being made available to all in the release LinkedIn is currently promoting around its Sales Navigator subscription.