LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index is a measurement used by the platform that tells you how well you are performing as a LinkedIn user in terms of social selling. It is based on the assumption that LinkedIn creators and users are salespersons. This means it judges your ability to sell.
LinkedIn has quickly become the latest frontier for social selling, that is, selling on social media as opposed to relying on ad campaigns. The social media platform hosts about 1 billion users.
It is ideal for B2B interactions, unlike other social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook.
On these other platforms, people post about things that may not necessarily be business-related, such as the ubiquitous cat pic.
However, LinkedIn is a platform where the majority of users are looking for business opportunities. Also, only 1% of LinkedIn users are creators posting content. This means the competition is relatively low and the opportunities for B2B selling are vast and abundant.
But this presents a dilemma. How do you sell while coming across as natural? LinkedIn is often described as the most cringe social media out there. It started off as a job-search platform, with people being compelled to be as stiff and stodgy as possible to impress their current or potential bosses.
So, how do you achieve a high Social Selling Index on LinkedIn without being cringe? I spoke to Daniel Kading, a brand advisor on LinkedIn, to understand what Social Selling is and how to sell successfully on LinkedIn.
What is your Social Selling Index?
So what is your Social Selling Index or SSI, and why is it important? LinkedIn now makes it easy for everyone to find out what their SSI score is. LinkedIn provides a Sales Navigator link that shows you exactly what your score is. And breaks it down into each of its four individual components.
It’s a dynamic score that changes by the day based on your performance on LinkedIn. Below fifty percent means you need more work to do. Here is the link where you can access your own SSI score: LinkedIn SSI Link
Seventy percent and higher means you’re leading in the pack of LinkedIn thought leaders.
How to read your SSI score
Your SSI score is made up of four component, which are all equally weighted and scored. They each are worth twenty-five points. They include: 1. Establish your professional brand, 2. Find the right people, 3. Engage with insights, and 4. Build relationships.
Each of these four components will be discussed in later sections. The picture above shows the SSI score of a professional in the business of content writing and editing. Well, to be completely honest. It's my SSI score. The score is exactly 50%.
However, remarkably, I still rank within the top 6% of professionals in my field or industry on the LinkedIn platform. What does that mean? It means the competition, at least within my industry, is not really that intense.
After all, it has been reported that just 1% of LinkedIn's 260 million active users post anything at all on the platform. This means that anyone can push up their SSI score to something impressive and increase their performance by understanding how it works.
Your SSI score page has more or less five sections or metrics that you should pay attention to. Let’s go over them here:
1. Your Industry SSI rank. This is located on the top left section of your SSI page. And it measures your ranking among the peers of your industry. In my case, I rank in the top 6% of professionals in the Writing and Editing industry.
2. Your Network SSI rank. This is located on the top left section. It measures your rank among your network, that is your connections and followers.
3. Your Current Social Selling Index. This is the heart of the SSI score page. It provides your overall SSI score on the left. And on the right, it shows what you score for each one of the four individual components that make up the SSI score.
4. Average scores for people in your industry. This shows the average SSI score for professionals in your industry.
5. Average scores for people in your network. This refers to exactly what it says — the average SSI scores of people in your LinkedIn network.
In short, your SSI score does a good job of showing your position as a potential social seller. It is not just an absolute score that should be considered in isolation. It also shows how you rank among peers in both your industry and network.
The components of your Social Selling Index
There are four components to your SSI score, as mentioned earlier:
Establish your professional brand
Find the right people
Engage with insights
Build relationships
Let’s look at each in turn.
1. Establish your professional brand.
This refers to 1) Completing your profile and 2) Your ability to put out posts that are relevant to your followers or audience. These two aspects go a long way toward helping establish yourself as a thought leader.
To help establish your professional brand, fill out each of the following sections of your profile:
Education
Work history
Skills
Summary
Headline
About Section
This is an important action to take, since LinkedIn and its algorithm uses it to recommend “People You May Know.” For example, if you graduated from a certain university, then your connection recommendation will be made up of people who attended that same educational institution.
The same thing can be said of your former jobs or industries that you worked in. You know what’s the cool thing about that feature? It can assist you in locating old friends or colleagues that you may have lost touch with or completely forgotten about.
It also has a second result. It helps you discover and connect with people that have similar backgrounds and interests to you. These people can eventually become partners or clients.
2. Find the right people
This metric gauges your ability to identify and locate better prospects in an efficient fashion using the “right tools.” Now, it should be made clear what LinkedIn means by the “right tools.” LinkedIn is referring to its proprietary software — Sales Navigator — a premium product that you have to pay for that helps in finding B2B clients successfully. As of May 2024, the pricing for the Sales Navigator begins at around $72.
This means it may be a bit more difficult for you to get a good score if you’re one of those persons using LinkedIn for free. LinkedIn, in short, wants you to buy this proprietary software. And they are willing to reward you for doing so by boosting your SSI.
Apart from the automatic SSI boost you get from using the Sales Navigator, is there any benefit to using it? On the Sales Navigator page, LinkedIn highlights three main benefits of using the Sales Navigator:
Discover warm channels leading to influential connections
Prioritize accounts most likely to result in the biggest sales wins
Follow signals to help identify warm or qualified buyers
In short, Sales Navigator makes the sales process more efficient. It helps you find leads and prioritize accounts most likely to yield the most value in terms of opportunities. Lastly, it can assist you in identifying buyers who signal a willingness to buy.
3. Engage with insights
This refers to your level of engagement with others on LinkedIn. This is not simply a one-way street. Instead, it takes into account the engagement that you receive as much as it does the engagement that you give. This measures things like:
The number of likes and comments you receive under your posts and how you engage with other people’s posts
Your ability to create content and provide the LinkedIn timeline with great posts
How frequently you share others’ content on your newsfeed or timeline
How frequently you publish articles and newsletters and engage with people who like, comment, and share such content
How many LinkedIn groups are you an active member of
How often do you use Sales Navigator to save company accounts and search the homepages of these accounts
This has been described as the most difficult component to earn high scores in. Most people have the lowest score in this sub-metric. So, daily engaging with your followers by liking, sharing, and commenting is key to make sure you maximize your score in this area.
4. Build relationships
This refers to building relationships based on trust. Most people score the highest in this section. Also, to score well in this component, regularly message new followers and respond to their messages in your DMs and inbox. Here are some tips to follow to build relationships:
Focus on creating connections and building relationships with Decision Makers (i.e., business leaders, founders, and CEOs)
Engage with people who like your posts and comment on them
Be always on the lookout for new customers by starting conversations with people who match your ICPs
Make sure to always answer messages in your LinkedIn inbox and messages
Use InMail and Sales Navigator skilfully. Make sure you tailor your message and pitches to obtain a high response in these applications. Ideally, you should aim for a response rate that is 10% or higher.
As mentioned earlier, this is the area that is the easiest to score high in. Treat building relationships on LinkedIn like building relationships in the real world. How do you do so?
Constantly look out for opportunities to start conversations with the end of building relationships. Your target could be influential Decision Makers or peers who are part of the industry you belong to.
The importance of your SSI
Your social selling index shows how adept you are at social selling. So, what exactly is social selling? Social selling involves making connections with potential clients or customers on social media to convert them into leads and eventually sales.
Social selling is based on the idea that the more you interact and communicate with your target customer profiles virtually, the more you garner brand interest for yourself and your business. This is different from bombarding customers with outbound calls and appeals. Cold outbound can easily turn people off.
Social selling on the other hand means you warm people up to you and your brand. This means that you are setting your target customers up for conversion into leads and sales. As a result, when customers or businesses are ready to purchase, your brand will be at the front of their minds.
This describes the inbound sales process. To learn more about, inbound social selling, take a look at this previous article: What is social selling the inbound way?
So what are the explicit benefits of a high Social Selling Index score? According to LinkedIn, creators with high SSI scores:
Create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower scores
Are 51% more likely to reach quota
Are more likely to outsell peers who don’t use social media
So, there are solid benefits to be had from a high SSI. It’s not just an empty gamified metric.
Social selling and personal branding
Personal branding and social selling have become quite popular on social media, especially on LinkedIn. Social media has now made it so that everyone and anyone can practically be their own brand and sell themselves.
“Without a personal brand, you’re just a set of services and that's boring. But a personal brand helps you build depth. Helps you build trust and ultimately helps you scale your social media presence. — Daniel Kading”
LinkedIn began as a job platform, where you posted your profile in the hope that you could impress potential employers. Since then, LinkedIn has morphed into a vibrant cyber marketplace populated by coaches, copywriters, content creators, and all kinds of other creative influencers building their personal brands. And of course, selling their services.
Daniel runs an agency to help founders scale through digital marketing and social media. He also runs a newsletter called the Social Sauce, where he speaks about social selling systems.
He described how personal branding and social selling work in conjunction with each other.
“Personal branding . . . would be the side of yourself that you reveal through your content,” he says. “That has nothing to do with your niche or your industry. It has more to do with your personality, your beliefs, your thoughts, your ideas. And then showcasing those to the world for other people to engage with and also connect with and be inspired by.”
He goes on to further say, “without a personal brand, you’re just a set of services and that's boring. But a personal brand helps you build depth. Helps you build trust and ultimately helps you scale your social media presence.”
He compares the link between personal branding and social selling to the marketing funnel. Personal branding is the awareness stage and begins at the very top of the funnel, where consumers or potential consumers get to know you.
“So in content, personal branding is the awareness,” he says. “Social selling is the middle of the funnel where you are creating and nurturing new leads and pushing them to the bottom of the funnel which is either your email or a paid community, something like that, or a consultation.”
LinkedIn takes the concept of a social selling index quite seriously. In fact, they have a Social Selling Index metric that is available to all LinkedIn users. It can tell you what your social indexing score is.
The principles underlying a high Social Selling Index
Sam Rathing in her book – Linked Inbound — explains that three principles underlie social selling:
The VCO process
Understanding the concept of Social Selling Index
Understanding the concept of Givers Gain
The book contains a wealth of rich and actionable information, and I have included an affiliate link below, through which you can purchase it. This means I may get a small commission if you purchase the book.
VCO is an acronym that stands for Visibility, Credibility, and Opportunity. Actually, it’s more than just an acronym. It’s a mathematical formula that goes like this:
V + C = O
This means making yourself visible on social media and doing so in a way that makes you credible in terms of what you offer. This results in the creation of opportunities for your business. It’s a principle based on the real-world concept of referral marketing.
In referral marketing, networking is done on a face-to-face basis. It centers around the power of close, dynamic, and mutually beneficial relationships with your followers and connections on LinkedIn.
On LinkedIn, visibility refers to having a profile that stands out. Your name, what you do, who you’re out to help, and what’s so special about your offer should be stated clearly.
And of course, there's the content that you post. You're not supposed to post willy-nilly. There’s a science to it. Before posting, you need to ask questions like:
Who is your target audience?
What are their pain points?
How can you help them?
All your posts ideally should somehow try to address these questions. And you have to post regularly. Some people argue that you should even preferably post every day. LinkedIn provides social creators with a wide variety of content forms.
This includes text-based posts, carousels, pictures, and videos. Some do it better than others. However, Daniel warns not to overdo it. Post more than twice a day, and you might end up finding yourself stuck in the sand, with LinkedIn deliberately stunting your reach.
Givers Gain means simply offering solutions for free in your content and being rewarded for that. When you offer such solutions you build trust and credibility.
This leads to the creation of a network of grateful followers or supporters who will have you as the first person in mind when they have a problem that needs soving. Also, they will be the first to refer their friends with similar problems.
Navigating LinkedIn’s cringe factor
Now that you have a full grasp of how to master social selling, how do you go about actually selling without coming across as cringe? LinkedIn has often been described as cringe. As an example, I think we’ve all come across the notorious LinkedIn joke about the man who encountered a dog on the way to a job interview by Lumko Solwande:
This is of course a parody. But it accurately mocks or exaggerates alot of what happens on LinkedIn, especially in terms of contrived or forced positivity. Most people, even on LinkedIn would agree.
LinkedIn influencers try to drive engagement with cliche story-telling tricks and gimmicks. The LinkedIn algorithm remains one of the few social media algorithms that is highly tuned to organic reach. And people try to take advantage of that.
A recent feature by Emily Stewart called The shame of LinkedIn also explained why LinkedIn at times feels so cringe. She says, “Posting and interacting there, for most people, entails a level of forced positivity and performative professionalism that isn't really matched anywhere else online.”
Daniel didn’t read Emily’s Business Insider article, but he agreed that LinkedIn was absolutely cringe. But his reasons differ from hers.
“I think that people on LinkedIn get way too used to being able to create some of the crappiest content. And that type of content will get slaughtered on YouTube, on Reddit, [and] on X Twitter,” he says. “So then they go to other platforms and they try they think they can just scale.”
However, it turns out that other social media have higher standards and are not so easily impressed. He believes that too many users are stuck behind LinkedIn’s old dorky image. “It's like the buttoned-up, sweater vest, Microsoft. You know, the Bill Gates brands opposed to like the coolness of Apple and Steve Jobs,” he says.
Final thoughts on Social Selling Index
Being authentic is crucial to social selling success on LinkedIn. You should just be yourself, and not try to sell too much. According to Daniel, it’s not all about putting your best face forward.
You should be unafraid to occasionally share your losses and trials. That makes you come across as more human and approachable to potential clients. LinkedIn remains one of the best platforms for social selling. That’s because the people participating in it have money on the line.
“A lot of people are here to play. They're here to create content, they're here to connect with other professionals,” he says. “They're not here to tune out and scroll and, and nod off and, and zone out at the end of their day. They are on their desktop, they have their email open, they might even have their CRM and their Slack.”
However, there are negative trends taking hold on the platform as well. For example, LinkedIn recently has shown some favor towards AI. LinkedIn has made it way too easy for people to drop AI comments and they've also made it way too easy to create AI-generated content. They should have just not done that.”
A big part of what will allow you to win on LinkedIn is not shying away from who you are. In short, you should be unafraid or unashamed about expressing your personality.
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