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In this article, you learn how to use LinkedIn's social selling index to identify potentials to strengthen your personal brand on LinkedIn without wasting time.
If you ask yourself if this guide can help you to rack up your SSI game, read further and see which topics we will go through.
You learn what the social selling index is and how you benefit from using it
You will see exactly how you can optimize your score, therefor improve your personal brand
There is not much competition in this field. However, there is one tool you can use to identify optimization potentials
My personal opinion if the social selling index is good enough to be used as your "go-to" dashboard
This article is all about LinkedIn's famous social selling index. If you watch your feed from time to time you certainly see posts about the SSI. Out of my experience, these are either people who claim to have achieved a high score on LI's SSI or others who express to not understand the score at all. I have to admit: when I first saw the score I was confused. With this article, I like to help you understand what the Selling Index is and how you can benefit from using it.
Note: This article aims to provide a practicable guide in how to use the LinkedIn SSI effectively for content and profile optimization efforts. Straight ahead, if you are looking for a tool to monitor your LinkedIn success you might want to check out our LinkedIn Analytics Dashboard → it's 100% free to get started.
The Social Selling Index is a tool from LinkedIn to make your own activities on the platform measurable. The dashboard shows how strong your personal brand on LinkedIn is in terms of your interactions, your engagement on the platform, and the quality of your connections.
With the score, LinkedIn tries to evaluate how likely it is for you to succeed with your social selling efforts. A higher score means a higher likelihood of success.
The tool is the preliminary stage to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and is linked within the tool.
The Social Selling Dashboard is divided into 4 main categories: building your personal brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building meaningful relationships.
Other than that, there is an attempt to benchmark you with other people in your industry. This is done by the algorithm assigning you to an industry that the platform thinks best suits you and then compare your score with others in the industry and your network.
The 4 pillars Of the SSI are the heart of the Social Selling Index (the new version has only 3 pillars)
Establishing a brand on LinkedIn takes dedication and time. The result is usually worth it: More profile views from interesting people, more contact requests, and a higher level of engagement are characteristics of a strong personal brand on LinkedIn.
What does that mean? Finding the right people? LinkedIn wants you to connect with people that are likely to benefit from your activities and offers. That's why you should always aim to offer value first when joining a conversation or any other interchange.
This metric is influenced by several triggers. These include, for example, interacting with and commenting on the contributions of other people. Sharing your own posts also has a positive effect on your score.
LinkedIn Connection Message Example:
Hey Jeff,
saw your latest post about effective LinkedIn Marketing. Appreciate the work you put in there to summarize all your learnings!
I also saw on your profile that you work on PROJECT, are you still active there? Anyways, would love to connect.
Cheers,
Tim
Building relationships with others is a key strategy to use the platform to its full potential. LinkedIn gives you some ideas on how to build those meaningful connections. Here are some thoughts:
LinkedIn Follow-Up Message Example:
Hi Dave,
found this marketing gem while browsing youtube, thought you'd like it. The guy from epic light media always points out interesting channels he’d like to get attention from by the end of each video:
Example 1: **https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbg9OsbJCqs (**14:30)
He makes it in a funny and entertaining way. He goes against the expectations of the audience by explicitly mentioning that -no- one should subscribe or like.
Rather, go and subscribe to other channels. I think it great because of:
1. how he makes himself stand out by doing so
2. how he gets attention from people recognizing his mentions (and telling people to comment under their channel).
Cheers,
Tim
inlytics offers you a comprehensive LinkedIn Analytics Dashboard to improve content performance.
Sign up now and start for free.
Straight forward: in the middle of your dashboard navigate to the "Weekly social selling index". What you find here is a line chart visualization of the past 7 weeks (49 days). This index tracks your previous efforts. You can see at one glance how your score changed over time.
Usually, if you get more active the score will rise. But be informed: I've never experienced a sudden rise of more than a few percentage points in one week.
Even when I had an extremely active phase during that time. That's also what I heard from colleagues and friends who use the SSI to their advantage.
With LinkedIn's Selling Index you can see how well you compare to people in your network and industry. LinkedIn automatically categorizes you into one industry. Based on that you will be compared.
Some people report to be assigned the wrong or slightly inaccurate industry. You might just try to modify your current position in your profile to change that.
Here is my example, I'm just slightly above the SSI of my network peers but still have a lot of room for improvement (lazy sloth). You could argue that I'm just a little more active/ optimized than most people in my personal network. You also might notice that you are able to check the different colored chart-pieces, seeing where your peers are better or worst than you.
In my example right here, the Marketing and Advertising industry is pretty low on average when it comes to SSI. For my personally, this is interesting but rather not helpful to figure out how to improve. What would indeed help is to see what others do, which helps them get a higher score, aka. build better relationships on LinkedIn.
One way to figure out just that is by signing up to inlytics. We are currently working on a machine learning algorithm that benchmarks you with people in your industry. We will continually enhance the algorithm to give concrete to-do's on how to improve your account. Register now, this feature is coming.
Quite honestly: I don't use LinkedIn's SSI benchmarking part that much. Benchmarking is interesting to see how I compare to others, but it does not directly help me to better up.
Doe one thing can be helpful: checking where most people in your network are better than you - you might grab some insights for yourself (checking out which part of the pie-chart diagram is higher on average than yours and then search a way to improve just that).
This question is asked quite a lot. Of course, it's always subjective what is "good" for you and what is not. If you would ask me, I'd say for active LinkedIn users a score from 0-30 is below average (not so good), 31-50 is ordinary, 51-70 is above average and everything over 70 is pretty solid.
Some people manage to get over a total score of 90+. Here I would assume that the profile is extremely well optimized.
Did I mention "alternative"? Well, yes I did. We build a tool that aims to help you improve content performance, by providing you actionable insights about your LinkedIn profile. We do that with a variety of product features, including:
With that said, let's look at the SSI alternative. We provide a comprehensive (free) checklist that gives you many ideas on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. You find it in your inlytics dashboard under "Profile".
Here's the deal: Signup for free and provide us with your feedback (in-app feedback). We'd like to learn how we can improve based on your specific needs - we can't do that without you! In return to that, you get a free account (There are paid plans too, but yours is staying free). Interested? Go ahead and signup here.
You guessed it: It depends on your needs. I know, I know, I know... this is not what you want to hear. But speaking out of my own experience, many people - including me - do not get many helpful insights out of the SSI.
There are interesting facts like, where I have opportunities to optimize my profile (the four/ three pillars) but after all the SSI dashboard lacks quite some actionable advice in my opinion.
That does not mean others are not motivated by using it and start improving based on the insights they get? Of course not. Its just not.. for everyone!
To make a bottom line I try to don't make a too generic conclusion. I will put it this way:
Putting time & energy in optimizing the SSI MAY be a fit for you if:
✅You are willing to invest time to figure out how to improve based on the metrics you see
✅You're not demoralized when results don't happen overnight
✅Seeing stat's rise does give you a push and motivate you to further invest in the platform
The SSI IS NOT a fit for you if:
❌You expect to get immediate results from just optimizing a few things
❌You value actionable insights more than "just" stats and figures
WRITTEN BY
I help startups to validate their critical assumptions, sharpen the business case and ultimately generate traction.
I answer the questions that you may still have
There are many ways to improve your score with a little work. In the above mentioned examples under "How To Use The Social Selling Dashboard" I give you some ideas what you can do.
Either you type in "https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi" directly in your browser or you can find the dashboard in your sales navigator dashboard under "Admin" "User Reporting".
Essentially, the SSI tells you how well optimized your profile is in terms of your personal brand/visibility. It depends on how important these attributes are to you. One thing is clear: The Social Selling Index is only an attempt to measure your activities on LinkedIn and to show you potential areas for improvement. In my opinion, the score is particularly suitable for this.
LinkedIn provides you with a variety of different measurement tools. If you are interested in learning more about that topic, I've written a complete guide for how to use the LinkedIn dashboard. Check it out, it's worth it.
LinkedIns social selling index is updated once a day - every 24 hours.
LinkedIn's social selling index is based on a scale of 0 to 100 and calculated using your activities on LinkedIn. There is no clear indication from within LinkedIn how exactly the score is calculated and which action influences certain parts of the score the most. In any way, I do not think it's important to focus on how to improve the score, rather see the score as an indication where you can better up.
