How to Use LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) to Boost Your Sales (2024)

With LinkedIn being the biggest platform for connecting professionals, it’s easy to think it’s just a networking platform. 

However, LinkedIn is much more than that– it’s one of the most powerful sales and lead-generation tools. 

While that’s not news to anyone, social selling on LinkedIn can be a bit ambiguous. How exactly can you sell on LinkedIn in an effective and human way? 

That’s where LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (LinkedIn SSI) comes into play. 

Over the past few months, I’ve been active on LinkedIn and engaged with social selling. 

The results are crazy. I’ve managed to:

• Grow from 300 followers to over 2500 organic followers
• Generate multiple 4-5 figure/mo leads (some I’ve taken, some I passed on)
• Reach over 200k people with my content

Social selling on LinkedIn works.

And that’s why I’ll be breaking down what LinkedIn SSI is, how you can find your score, improve it and use it to supercharge your social selling.

What is Social Selling?

Social selling is the process of using social media to interact with potential customers, build relationships and ultimately, drive sales. It’s a way of selling that focuses more on building relationships and providing value than the hard sell. 

Social selling has many benefits, but the biggest reason it’s so important is due to the buying process changing dramatically over the years. The internet has redefined many industries, and impersonal or cold outreach doesn’t work anymore. 

Source

In fact – sales professionals who are great social sellers were found to create more opportunities and are 51% more likely to hit their sales quota.

While it’s possible to do social selling on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is by far the best platform for social selling – especially for B2B sales. 

That’s because LinkedIn is a platform that’s designed specifically for professionals. It’s where people are already looking to make business connections and are learning more about potential business opportunities.

In other words, LinkedIn is the perfect breeding ground for social selling.

What Social Selling is not

Before I move on to talk about the LinkedIn SSI score, note that social selling does not mean spamming people with messages or sending connection requests to random people. 

Social selling is not about being “sales-y” or looking for a one-time sale. It’s about building relationships, providing value, becoming a thought leader, and ultimately earning your potential customers’ trust.

What is LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI)?

The LinkedIn social selling index is a metric that’s designed to measure your social selling efforts – specifically on LinkedIn.

It’s a score that allows you to measure how your individual efforts add up.

There are 4 key pillars found that make successful social sellers. Each pillar is given a score out of 100, and your overall LinkedIn SSI score is an average of the 4 scores.

Let’s break them down.

What are the 4 factors of the Linkedin SSI?

1. Establish your professional brand

This is all about creating a strong, professional LinkedIn profile that accurately represents your personal brand.

Your LinkedIn account should be complete with:

• A professional profile photo;
• A banner or background photo;
• An updated headline and summary;
• Clear information about who you are and your expertise.

It’s also important to establish yourself as a thought leader in your space by publishing meaningful posts. 

2. Find the right people

The second factor of the social selling index is finding the right people to connect with.

This means doing an efficient search or using research tools to find potential customers and prospects interested in your product or service.

This is where having premium accounts like LinkedIn premium or LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be really helpful, as it allows advanced search features to aid in lead generation for social selling.

It also means joining relevant groups to engage with LinkedIn users with similar interests.

3. Engage with insights

The third factor of the linked SSI score includes engaging with insights.

You can share and comment on LinkedIn posts relevant to your industry to meet this criteria. In addition, you can share conversation-worthy updates or interact with posts shared by potential prospects.

It’s a way of starting meaningful conversations and building trust and rapport with potential customers.

4. Build relationships

As the name suggests, this last factor is all about building relationships.

This means establishing trust by finding and connecting with the right decision-makers, providing value, and being responsive when engaging in conversations.

How to find your LinkedIn SSI score

You can find your LinkedIn SSI score by logging into your LinkedIn account and going to the social selling index page.

Once you’re on the social selling index page, you’ll see your score and how you rank compared to other LinkedIn users.

You’ll also see your score for each of the 4 pillars as discussed earlier.

What’s a good LinkedIn SSI Score?

While there’s no official guide to what makes a good LinkedIn SSI score, there’s one certain indicator that can help you see how good your LinkedIn SSI Score is.

Notice that when you see your social selling index score, you also see how you compare relative to:

1. Your Team;
2. Your Industry;
3. Your Network.

So if we look at mine as an example, we can see that:

1. My team has an average SSI of 75, and I rank 1 of 1 (granted, as I run a one-person business – so this isn’t too helpful!)
2. In my industry, the average SSI score is 38. LinkedIn tells me that I rank in the top 1%
3. Compared to the people in my network, my LinkedIn SSI Score of 75 is much better than the average LinkedIn social selling index of 46. I also rank in the top 2% amongst my peers.

So a good SSI score is one where your score is better than the average of people in your team, industry, and network.

While you may think that the higher your SSI score, the better – a high SSI score doesn’t necessarily translate to sales conversations or opportunities.

That’s because there are many ways to manipulate the social selling score (as I’ll discuss later.) And, of course, it would be naive to think that your sales solutions rest on a vanity score.

But in saying that, this score is a good metric to look at for a simple reason: the activities these score measures do have a very real connection to developing your social selling skills and putting you in a position to succeed.

And with that, let’s look at how you can improve your SSI on LinkedIn.

5 ways to improve your LinkedIn SSI score

Before we look at some tips, it’s important to understand that the social selling index on LinkedIn is constantly changing.

This means that what worked yesterday to improve your SSI score, may not work today.

That’s why it’s important to keep up with the latest trends and changes in social selling so you can adapt your strategy as needed.

Now, let’s look at tips on improving your LinkedIn SSI score!

1. Publish valuable content

The first way to improve your linked SSI score is to publish valuable content.

This means creating and sharing interesting, engaging, and relevant updates with your target audience.

When I started posting and sharing relevant content, my engagement increased dramatically, which indicated to LinkedIn that my content was valuable.

The higher my engagement, the higher my social selling index score got.

This was the result of me posting on Linkedin for just 4 weeks.

2- Revamp your LinkedIn profile

Your LinkedIn profile is one of the first places people will go to when they want to know more about you. It’s also a way for you to establish your professional brand.

That’s why it’s important that your profile accurately reflects who you are, what you do, and how you can help your target audience.

If you want to improve your social selling index score on LinkedIn, make sure your profile is up-to-date, complete, and accurately reflects your personal brand.

3. Grow your network

One of the factors that go into calculating your SSI score is the size of your network.

The logic behind this is simple: the more decision-makers you connect with, the more opportunities you have to sell to them.

That’s why one of the best ways to improve your social selling index score is to grow your LinkedIn network.

4. Increase your activity on LinkedIn

LinkedIn looks at how active you are on the platform when calculating your social selling index score.

The more active you are, the higher your score will be.

5. Use social selling tools

There are a number of social selling tools available that can help you automate and streamline your social selling process.

Using social selling tools can help you save time and be more efficient with your social selling efforts – both of which can positively impact your SSI score.

Some tools to consider:

• LinkedIn premium
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Social listening tools to understand your customers 

You may also be interested in other prospecting or B2B contact tools. 

With consistency comes results

The most important thing to remember when trying to improve your social selling index score is that consistency is key.

You won’t see results overnight. It takes time, effort, and consistency to increase your SSI score.

But one thing is for certain: social sellers outsell peers. And as someone who has been social selling on LinkedIn – I can certainly attest to this. 

While I was not consciously trying to increase my SSI score, it was undeniable that the influx in opportunities, social media followers, and blog subscribers directly resulted from my social selling efforts.

Not to mention the awesome relationships I’ve built in my industry.

So whether your goal is to improve your SSI score or not, social selling should certainly be part of your digital and sales strategy. 

Do you use social selling? What strategies have you used to increase your SSI score? Let me know your thoughts!

Good luck!

Jessica