What is Linkedin SSI?
LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a metric that decides what the rank of your profile will be, depending upon how well you have optimized your profile and the level of your outreach campaigns. The better they are, the more boost your profile gets.
According to LinkedIn, your profile is given a score between 0 and 100, sometimes called the SSI score, which determines the extent to which you as an individual or as a company have adapted to the four pillars of social selling.
For each pillar, the perfect score is 25, which for 4 of them (4*25) makes up a 100, and according to LinkedIn, this score is excellent in gauging the social selling and marketing skills of a person.
Is Linkedin SSI a valid metric?
There is still a healthy debate among marketers and salespeople about the SSI score and if it actually is a valid metric to test your skills with.
But should you still try it? Absolutely! Because LinkedIn statistics say that:
- People with a higher SSI score tend to produce 45% more opportunities than those with a lower SSI score
- People who are Social Sellers make 78% higher sales than those who stay off of social media.
- There is a 51% higher chance of you reaching your quota if you’re a social seller.
The social selling index provides you with a fixed criterion, making it easier to optimize your LinkedIn profile. Once you know what you need, making adjustments to your marketing activities and LinkedIn profile to achieve it becomes straightforward. You will know exactly what to work on in order to boost your profile, and as the entire strategy is divided into four pillars, you will know exactly where you are lacking.
And as you focus on the right things, your SSI score increases, which, according to LinkedIn claims, also increases your sales.
LinkedIn urges people to have a Sales Navigator, which gives your sales roughly a 20% boost in just six months.
The usefulness of these 4 Social Selling Pillars is why we have created this guide. In this guide, we will let you know:
- What LinkedIn SSI Pillars are.
- How to boost your SSI score for each pillar.
- How to measure your SSI score.
- The benefits of having a LinkedIn profile with a high SSI score.
Let’s begin by focusing on the first two points: What LinkedIn SSI Pillars are and how you can boost each by spending just a quarter of an hour each day.
LinkedIn SSI Pillars: What They Are and How to Boost Your SSI Score for Each Pillar
The four pillars of the Social Selling Index are:
- Creating a Professional Brand
- Finding Your Target Audience
- Using Insights to Engage
- Building Valuable Business Relationships
Let’s look at each of these pillars and the techniques to boost them in detail.
Creating a Professional Brand:
Presenting yourself as a professional brand means having a completed profile, with all the sections filled in for the target audience. Providing all the necessary information about you out in the open means you are trustworthy, and you have nothing to hide. It also means your brand is not in the phase of figuring things out and knows exactly who they are.
For starters, here is a checklist you can use to perfect your LinkedIn profile:
Complete your LinkedIn Profile
Completing your profile involves adding a professional profile picture, a banner image, a summary to explain the type of work you do, a tagline for your brand, recommendations from people and businesses in the market, and your experience in the relevant field, your correct contact information, and so on.
Utilize Multimedia
Try adding presentations and videos to your profile to make it lively.
Professionally developed, if posted regularly, can help you gather more engagements on your profile.
Get Recommendations and Endorsements
Try getting people to endorse your skills, and if you can, aim to get recommendations from people (especially your clients).
Make Long-Form Posts on LinkedIn Pulse
While most people are unaware of it, you can post full-length articles on the LinkedIn pulse, which can help you boost your profile.
It is also important to engage with the content of your peers and clients to get back engagements.
You are aiming to establish yourself as a leader in the market, and giving attention to these little details can help you go far.
Finding Your Target Audience:
The success of your SSI strategy and your lead generation campaigns depends upon finding the right people for your niche. Once you have your target audience, the only thing left is interacting and engaging with them.
To find your potential buyers, you can use:
- LinkedIn groups for your search.
- LinkedIn search feature (Regular/Advanced)
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator that lets you use “posted on LinkedIn” filter, provides you job changes alerts and lets you know about anyone who has similar activities to your clients and much more!
- Automated outreach campaigns to save time and effort.
Using automated outreach campaigns
Let’s focus on the automated outreach campaigns for a while.
The major benefit of using these campaigns is how they cut down the amount of effort required to generate and retain leads. You no longer have to connect lead-by-lead, and you can send one connection request for all the similar types of leads. Learn more about automating your outreach campaigns here.
Do you have anything in common with your target audience? If you know them well enough, you know who they follow and what they engage with. Bundle all such potential audiences together, and write a template to pique these people’s interest by mentioning your similarities with them.
In this way, you will be able to carry out a more efficient lead generation campaign with a lot less effort.
Read this article for a more comprehensive guide about target audience.
To summarize, you need to have a defined target audience. You need to stay proactive, avail follows up opportunities, and use your LinkedIn profile to assist you in connecting with people and keep proper track of your relationships.
Using Insights to Engage
Once you have sought out your potential buyers, it’s time to move to the next LinkedIn SSI pillar – using insights to engage. This pillar gives you an SSI score on the basis of the likes, shares and comments your posts are receiving.
So, in order to receive high engagements, you need to share click-worthy and useful insights. If the audience finds your content relevant and valuable, it will begin conversations that will only act to your advantage.
Some people also use intelligent tactics to urge their audience to interact, for example, “comment if you want this”. People are more likely to engage with your content if it offers them some value. Once they do that, it’s your turn to engage with their content.
As the cycle continues, you will find your connections growing every day!
Building Valuable Business Relationships
This LinkedIn SSI pillar requires you to increase your network by interacting and engaging with the leaders and decision-makers in your niche. As a social seller, your only motive should be building lasting relationships!
But how can you find the right people to build these relationships with?
The LinkedIn Advanced search filters with Boolean Operators are crucial in this regard. They help you to narrow down your research and pinpoint your target better.
There are three types of Boolean operators you can use:
AND – This includes all the items in your list, for example, “CEO” AND “Sales”.
OR – This finds results that include one or more items in your list, for example, “CEO” OR “Sales Manager.”
NOT – This excludes one or more items from your list, for example, Growth NOT hacks.
You can also use various automation tools to create and strengthen newly forged bonds. Several brands are known to offer a relevant freebie to create an initial link with their targets and then move towards a phone call or video call to further strengthen the lead.
Once your bond is established, you can do follow-ups and retargeting to retain your leads and build long-term connections.
How To Measure LinkedIn SSI Score and What Are The Benefits of Having a Good Score?
LinkedIn defines SSI as the score that measures the success of your sales ventures. However, there is no method to see its practical benefits.
While a good score means better results, it does not mean guaranteed success. For such surety, we need to take the number of qualified leads, audience engagement, return of investments and other relevant factors into account.
However, your SSI score links your marketing and networking efforts and the increase in opportunities and high-quality prospective buyers.
If your networking and sales activities are surrounded by LinkedIn, it’s useful to gauge your profile using your SSI score.
At this point, it would be wise to mention that there is no standard score by which every industry goes. Your scores are relative and depend upon how well the people in your niche are performing.
And that is where “the people in your industry/network” sections come in. With the help of these, you can see at what score people in your industry or network fall in and how far behind you are from them. It also shows the percentage pool you fall into, e.g. the top 6%, 10%, etc.
Your goal should be to improve your SSI score continuously.
If your score in any one of the pillars is less, for example, “find your target audience”, it means you need to up your connections game.
Once you smartly focus on LinkedIn outreach, your SSI score will get a boost as well. Make sure you follow the tactics and tips this post offered. Once you do that, your quality leads and your sales success should get a boost too.
Conclusion
To keep tabs on how successful the sales were as well as how good is your profile’s performance, LinkedIn uses the metric called SSI (Social Selling Index). Following are the four pillars of SSI:
- Creating a Professional Brand
Complete your profile and make posts for your target audience. Add different media, like presentations, and try to keep those posts related to you and your profile.
- Finding Your Target Audience
Identify the people relevant to your niche quickly using campaigns and different tools.
- Using Insights to Engage
share click-worthy and useful insight that your audience will find valuable, and they can begin conversations that can help you build healthy relations with them.
- Building Valuable Business Relationships
Build good relationships with the leaders and decision-makers in your niche that will reinforce your network.
Your SSI metric will keep on rising if you are taking care of outreach and lead generation, but you can your different tools, such as Sales Navigator and safe LinkedIn automation tools, to increase your SSI even more efficiently.
Automation can work wonders for your LinkedIn. You can automate different outreaching tasks, including follow-up messages and requests for connection, and this will not only help to boost your SSI but also generate leads on autopilot. And you won’t be disturbed at all as these tasks will happen in the background. How good is that? All you need to do is to maximize your SSI, whether it’s using manual methods or automating everything completely, to have better results.
