How to Improve your SSI Score on LinkedIn

What is Social Selling?

Social selling is about using your social network to find the right people, build relationships and meet your sales goals via your social network. For most professionals, this will mean using LinkedIn.

Social activity is increasingly important to raise your personal profile and build your brand. It is also a way to network with others in the online space to help build on your real life interactions and networking activities. The aim of “social selling” is to add value, to share helpful content and engage with potential customers/clients to build strong and prosperous relationships.

Monitoring and improving on your SSI on LinkedIn can be a measurable way to monitor your activities and track improvements.

The Four Pillars of Social Selling

On LinkedIn, there are ‘Four Pillars of Social’. Each pillar is worth 25 points on the SSI and therefore improving each of these pillars will improve your overall SSI Score on LinkedIn.

1. Creating a Professional Brand

Your Social Media activity will build your professional brand. However, you need to remember to have a solid, professional brand and profile on your social media profiles to build upon. Linkedin SSI measures the strength of your professional profile and your professional brand. This also includes your reputation as a thought-leader in your industry. Examples of how you can improve your SSI ranking for professional brand include:

• Complete your profile 100% and have an “all-star” profile. This includes including a summary, headline, job title, experience etc.

• upload a professional profile picture.

• upload a cover photo.

• Include media content on your profile such as videos and presentations.

• Encourage contacts to leave endorsements and recommendations and aim to increase your endorsements and recommendations for your target areas.

• Write and publish long-form posts at regular intervals to share your expertise and boost your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.

2. Finding the Right People

The SSI takes into account how well you interact on LinkedIn. It analyses the value of your connections and relationships. LinkedIn (even the free version) can usefully be used to find people including potential prospects and the premium versions include additional tools that can be utilised to boost your ranking. Examples of how you can improve your finding people ranking include:

• Be active in your searches for prospective clients and contacts. If you use free version use keywords and filters to help with your searches. If you use premium services use the additional search features.
  

• Use filter criteria such as seniority, skills or role to help you find potential prospect profiles (who are out of your network).

• Check who has viewed your profile and engage with the people who viewed your profile.
  

• Save your leads in Sales Navigator or Lead builder (if you use the premium services).

3. Engaging With Insights

You need to engage with Insights. Engaging with insights will improve how you are using LinkedIn (not just raise your SSI). Use LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought-leader or expert and share relevant industry content, comment on articles and new and build your professional brand. Most things that you do on LinkedIn will be engagement. Examples of how you can improve your SSI ranking for engagement include:

• Engage every day. Take 10 minutes a day to like and comment on relevant content – this might be your content, content of your colleagues and clients, thought-leadership content.

• Position yourself as an expert by regularly sharing relevant content and industry news.

• Join and actively engage in LinkedIn groups.

• If you use a premium service – use Inmail to send messages and reach out to potential contacts.

• Connect and follow potential prospects, current customers and competitors to build your community.

4. Building Trusted Relationships

The last pillar is to build trusted relationships with your connections and potential prospects. Examples of how you can improve your SSI ranking for building trusted relationships include:

• continuing to expand your network by connecting with potential prospects, customers and connecting internally with co-workers.

• the strength of your connections is a consideration so connect with strong contacts and key decision makers.

• If you use a premium service – use Inmail to send messages and reach out to potential contacts and then build on those relationships.

• Don’t overdo it. Your acceptance success is taken into account. Therefore you should focus your efforts on making meaningful connections (not mass messaging everyone).

These are easy steps that you can take to improve your SSI ranking. Your SSI ranking will get updated on daily basis so do measure your progress even if you are only using LinkedIn as a networking tool and not for sales. After all, boosting your SSI ranking will mean that you are improving the way you are using LinkedIn (regardless of the reason you are using it).