As a coach and a heart-centered entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard about social selling. If you haven’t heard about it but have a social media account for your business or brand, you’re already engaged in the basics of social selling. Simply put, social selling is the art of using social media to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects (Hootsuite). As a professional social network, LinkedIn is a great place for social selling. And one of the tools that can help you become better at it is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index.

So what exactly is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index?

If you want your potential customer to think of you first when they’re ready to buy, you need to develop a meaningful relationship with them. The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (or SSI) is a score developed to indicate how well you’re doing in creating meaningful relationships within your network. It rates your efforts to leverage your LinkedIn profile for sales and marketing opportunities on a scale of one to one hundred.

The SSI rates you on four areas:

#1 Establishing your brand: How well does your profile establish you as a thought leader? Is your profile clear on what your potential customers need to know about you? 

#2 Finding the right people: Are the people who are a part of your current network the right prospects for you or your brand?

#3 Engaging with Insights: How good are you at discovering and sharing conversation-worthy updates to create and grow relationships?

#4 Building relationships: Is your network strong enough? Are you finding and establishing trust with the decision-makers in your industry?

The best part: Your LI SSI score is not set in stone. It’s updated daily. Thus giving you fresh opportunities to analyze and improve your score if needed.

So what LinkedIn Social Selling Index score should you aim for?

In terms of the top industry rank, you should shoot for being in the top 5%, ideally 1%.  The network SSI rank is not as important.

 Here’s a screenshot of my LI SSI (as of 24th April 2021)

It clearly shows what areas I’m doing well in and where there’s room for improvement. It also shows how I rank compared to others in the marketing and advertising industry. 

Want to know what your LinkedIn SSI is? You can check it out right here. 

Fun fact! LinkedIn has reported that profiles with higher scores have been able to close 45% more deals than their counterparts with lower LinkedIn SSI scores over the course of a year. 

Which leads to our next question:

How can you improve your LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score?

In order to improve your LI SSI score, you need to improve each area that LinkedIn rates you for. Let’s dive in!

1. Establishing your brand

81% of buyers are more likely to engage with a strong professional brand. And to make your brand stand out professionally you have to:

• Complete your profile with the customer in mind. Aim for an all-star status. 
• Make your profile more visual by using relevant graphics where needed.
• Post relevant content highlighting you as an expert or a thought leader in your niche. Try and use more than just text to showcase your expertise. 
• Interact with your network’s content to increase your visibility. 
• Support your network and add value for your customers by reposting useful high-quality content.
• Ask for endorsements and recommendations from connections you trust, have worked with, or have a good relationship with.
• Showcase the value you provided to a previous customer.
• Use LinkedIn Publisher to post some of your longer, more in-depth content.

2. Finding the Right People

You can use LinkedIn’s profile views, search tools, filters and advanced features to:

• Grow your connections organically by leveraging warm reach for 2nd level connections. I.e Build conversations with 2nd level people.
• Look for potential prospects and 3rd level connections in your industry.
• Engage with people who viewed your profile.

You can also be a part of relevant LinkedIn groups, look for potential leads there, nurture them and approach them via a direct message even if they’re not 1st level connections. 

3. Engaging with Insights

This is a hard one to increase as insights are mainly available for LinkedIn premium accounts. Basically, if you want a high score on insights, you have to pay.

Here’s what you can do though.

• Engage with the content you see on your feed.
• Leave a comment on the content of potential clients and people in your industry – use a couple of sentences when you respond.

If you already have a LinkedIn premium account you can use the LinkedIn sales navigator and insights to:

• Save and monitor key prospects and accounts
• Extend your reach by identifying similar prospects
• Take advantage of enhanced search features
• Display leads that follow your company.
• See who has posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days.
• Discover who has been mentioned in the news.
• Learn who has changed jobs recently.
• Identify people with shared connections.
• And so much more

4. Building relationships

Building and nurturing relationships over time keeps your services top of mind. Here’s what you can do to strengthen your network by building relationships.

• Engage with decision-makers in your industry.
• Spend 15-20 minutes per day, scrolling through the LinkedIn feed.  
• Take the time to read content and make comments to interact with the author and other users.
• If someone comments on your content, respond back with your own comment. Engage with content.
• After building connections, reach out to people periodically at appropriate times and provide relevant value to them.
• Have conversations with people in DMs.
• Never like a piece of content without leaving a comment
• Here are some amazing LinkedIn features you can try out for better engagement and relationships.

Social selling on LinkedIn (or any other social platform for that matter) is a deep topic. While I hope this information has been useful to you, I am sure there are a lot of other tips that can be equally useful. Check out our blog articles on LinkedIn marketing and hit us up if you need help.

And if you’re looking for a team (a community) of heart-centered professionals to support you with your marketing activities, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Amazing OBM.  You can start by scheduling a FREE 30-minute consultation. We are happy to chat, offer you some valuable tips, and determine if we are a good fit for one another in future endeavors!