LinkedIn Social Selling Index: What It Is and How To Improve It?

What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score? And how can you increase yours to a competitive level? In this post, we’ll answer both of these questions, with tips that can help you get your Social Selling initiative into high gear, with an impressive SSI score to prove it.

The Social Selling Index (SSI) provided by LinkedIn gives sales professionals insights into their Social Selling activity, enabling them to set targets and track their development as social sellers. Scored out of 100, the SSI score shows LinkedIn users how they rate against industry peers and their own network.

Users are able to track how their Social Selling Index ranking develops over time, as well as how they perform in four key areas: establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. The SSI score is a window into online sales performance.

Moreover, the Social Selling Index score is also a performance indicator in Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s paid subscription for salespeople engaged in prospecting. Having a good SSI score will allow you to stand out on the platform, with both a strong personal brand and professional brand to back you up in your social selling efforts. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is a powerful tool that incorporates SSI into its framework, although you no longer need a paid subscription to see your SSI.

The closer your LinkedIn Sales Navigator Social Selling Index score is to 100, the better you’re performing, receiving more connection requests, and being able to build relationships online, as compared to your peers.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator recommends that industry leaders have a Social Selling Index number of greater than 75 to stand out in the crowd and become a true Thought Leader in the field. So if you have a position of leadership at your company or in your industry, it might be worth making the effort to bump up that score at least to the 75 mark on your Social Selling Index LinkedIn page.

But you don’t have to be an industry leader with a personal brand to have a high Social Selling Index ranking. You can also position yourself as a Thought Leader in the field no matter your role, with the right strategy, valuable insights, and valuable content. Building your professional network and becoming influential isn’t contingent on having a position of corporate leadership.

For social sellers, it’s more about consistency, personal branding, and generating meaningful relationships. Things, incidentally, many business leaders and decision makers themselves can improve upon. Knowing your target audience, and connecting with that target audience by building meaningful relationships for lead generation, can take you much farther than you think!

You may also be interested in:What is Social Selling & how to make it work: The Ultimate Guide

To begin, log into your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account (or just your standard LinkedIn account) as you would for normal use, i.e. to make LinkedIn posts, connection requests, and to access LinkedIn tools.

Then, once you have access to your Sales Navigator account, go to the Social Selling Index LinkedIn page under “Sales”.

On this page of your LinkedIn account, you will find information related to your performance on LinkedIn compared to your peers for both your network and your sector. You will see the average Social Selling Index score of the group, your ranking in the X% compared to the average SSI score, and your progress across the week as part of your social selling performance.

If you have your job title and industry set on your LinkedIn account profile, the LinkedIn SSI score page will tell you the average Social Selling Index number for that position and industry.

LinkedIn will also tell you the average Social Selling Index score of your network, via your network SSI rank. And if you happen to be one of those lucky and/or talented individuals who have an industry SSI rank in the top 1%, congratulations—you’re officially considered a Thought Leader by Sales Navigator, and you probably have a personal brand that comes across on your LinkedIn posts.

Here are a few simple, practical steps you can take to boost your Social Selling Index score and get it up where you feel it needs to be.

Step 1: Complete your LinkedIn profile

Make sure you have a professional profile photo (plain background, correct outfit, preferably smiling face), your job title under the name, completed description with skills, recommendations, etc.

Your account is like a business card that must be complete, clear, and pleasant to browse. It’s hard to have a strong SSI score without a strong profile.

Step 2: Develop your professional network

Find the right profiles to complete your network, interact with people in your network (comment, react, share their posts, etc.). This will allow you to engage in conversation and to build relationships that will prove fruitful and relevant, gradually increasing your Social Selling Index score.

Simply following other industry leaders and influencers is a great way to start, and don’t be afraid to comment on their content to generate conversations.

Step 3: Be active on LinkedIn

Show your presence by sharing and commenting on relevant content adding elements specific to your expertise. In order to launch a successful Social Selling program, combine curation and employee advocacy to share high-quality information so that prospects say yay or nay with more confidence, including industry news, thought pieces, and interesting data. Your SSI score is a direct reflection of how engaged you are via your LinkedIn profile.

Note: It’s important to write publications and articles yourself. Talking about your experiences, your successes, or simply giving your point of view allows you to remain active and thus, increase your SSI score.

Step 4: Communicate regularly with your customers and prospects

In order to build strong relationships with your prospects and clients, maintain a steady connection. Stay in touch, reach out. You will expand your network to not only reach new direct prospects, but also those who can introduce you to new ones via their network.

Your Social Selling Index number will reflect the quality and number of your relationships. An impressive SSI score is the result of an impressive dedication to client success.

Step 5: Create your personal brand

This does involve enhancing your profile with a professional photo and bio, following relevant thought leaders, and creating your own content. But it also means offering a unique perspective to differentiate yourself from others in the field.

Promote original ideas and demonstrate that you are an authority on the matter, with a distinct personality and identity to boot. Back up your original claims with solid data and sources, showing the world that your ideas are valid. This will help solidify a personal brand that is instantly identifiable to others.

Tata Consultancy & Generali: Real-world Success Stories in Boosting SSI Score

Here are two great examples of businesses that increased their general SSI score while enhancing their social selling efforts, through the use of smart social strategy and a powerful digital tool.

Tata Consultancy, a leader in digital transformation with over 436,000 consultants in 46 countries, teamed up with Sociabble to boost their online social selling capabilities. They knew they had a huge employee base, and that they needed to find a way to leverage that network to create positive brand awareness and generate leads online. Generally speaking, their salesforce was very connected via social media–what was lacking however, was relevant TCS content, as well as a standardized way to track progress and measure results.

By using Sociabble to supply sales team members with targeted content and incentivize sharing with rewards, they saw their conversion rate double, from their previous average of between 3% and 5%, to a conversion rate of 10%, and also benefited from a paid media savings of $200,000 over three years, all of which could be monitored thanks to Sociabble’s full analytics package.

Generali, another Sociabble client, saw similar results. With 72,000 employees spread all across the globe, the insurance leader needed a mobile-friendly centralized platform to help manage their social selling initiative and give the sales teams more visibility online.

The Digital Visibility program for agents launched by Generali on the Sociabble platform has been a success in that it’s been adopted by thousands of agents—the initial launch goal of 30% active users was quickly reached, and it’s now approaching their primary KPI goal of 50% active. Additionally, the initial goal of 4 content shares per month, per agent, has been easily achieved, thanks to relevant content and transparent sharing capabilities provided by the Sociabble platform.

The program has already been deployed in offices in Italy, France, Slovenia, Vietnam, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic, proving that a large-scale Employee Advocacy and Social Selling initiative across multiple countries and cultures can work.

Also read:Social Media Advocacy: Scaling Up Your Social Selling & Employee Advocacy

No matter your industry or sector, Social Selling is a critical part of any sales tool kit. A strong LinkedIn Social Selling Index number is part and parcel of the business these days. But is having a high Social Selling Index ranking enough on its own? How do you monitor progress and keep track of fresh leads to strengthen your SSI score?

In short, you need a digital tool that can help you generate and track leads online, building relationships that can transition into actual sales over time. In this article, we’ve already shown specifically why your LinkedIn Social Selling Index matters, how to monitor it, and how to boost it—with a case study included as a real-world example, showing how a strong social strategy, together with the Sociabble platform, helped two different companies enhance their own Social Selling Index score.

If you’d like to know more about how Sociabble can help you deploy your Social Selling program, build your professional brand online, and increase your collective LinkedIn Social Selling Index score, you can sign up for a free demo. We’d love to chat!

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