Interact with your prospects and customers in the social age—not just on LinkedIn, but beyond. It’s important to measure social engagement, and that’s where the Index comes in. With its several metrics, you can better understand if and when your social networking efforts are working for you and your business.
LinkedIn has a new tool named “Social Selling Index” that helps you rank your social selling performance. It’s been rolled out to a small percentage of users, but if you’re among their lucky few, here’s how to make the most of the new feature.
LinkedIn is a social media platform that is always underestimated. However, it is not always easy to determine your effectiveness on the platform. Enter the LinkedIn social sales index. This handy metric tells you exactly how effective you are as a social marketer, and also shows you how to improve your performance. In this article you will learn everything you need to know about this tool, how to use it correctly and how to improve your score.
What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index?
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI), launched in 2014, measures the effectiveness of your social selling on the platform. LinkedIn uses four factors to calculate your SSI:
- personal branding
- finding the right person
- Involvement through ideas
- Building a relationship
Each factor gets 25 points. Complete them all and you’ll get an excellent grade. There are several reasons to aim for a high social sales index. First, a high score increases your reach on the platform. Although LinkedIn’s algorithm does not directly take your SSI into account when determining the reach of your posts, all of the individual factors that go into calculating your SSI will help you reach a larger audience. A high SSI can also lead to more connection requests and followers, making you a thought leader in your industry and making it easier to connect with decision makers. LinkedIn provides data that supports some of these claims. According to the Social Selling Index, top social sellers create 45% more opportunities than low social sellers and are 51% more likely to meet their quotas. Moreover, 78% of them perform better than their colleagues who do not use social media.
How to know your SSI score on LinkedIn
It’s easy to find your SSI on LinkedIn. If you are already connected to LinkedIn, follow the link below to see your score. Find your social sales index. You can also access your SSI through Sales Navigator by going to Admin and clicking on User Reporting. 
The main information in the dashboard is as follows:
- Your SSI value
- Score for each of the four components
- How your ISS compares to your sector’s performance
- How it fits into your network
The meaning of each of these indicators is discussed in detail below.
LinkedIn Social Sales Index Metrics
As I mentioned earlier, LinkedIn uses four factors to calculate a social sales index: Building a personal brand, finding the right people, getting attention and building relationships. But what do all these indicators actually mean? 
Here’s what you need to know.
Building a personal brand
For this measure, LinkedIn looks at how complete your profile is and the quality of the content you post on the platform. Do you have a photo of your application, a full employment history and references? How many posts do you make, and how many views and comments do those posts get?
Finding the right people
This measure is heavily weighted by Sales Navigator, making it difficult for free users to get good results. LinkedIn wants you to use its tools to find the right people, successfully connect with them, and create systems and automations to make the process easier.
Interacting with insights
Do you share popular content? If not, you probably won’t get good results from this measure. The more content you post and the more it is seen, liked and commented on, the higher your ranking will be.
Building relationships
The last measure concerns the management of the network. It is an indicator of the frequency and success of your approaches.
How to use the LinkedIn Social Selling Index
Other than being a vanity metric, how useful is LinkedIn’s Social Sales Index? That’s a good question. Some people, like Andrew O’Hearn, don’t see the point of this tool. He believes SSI is LinkedIn’s way of promoting Sales Navigator. Do we really want to reinforce the keyboard tendencies of some LinkedIn users who don’t often test their online assumptions in real (face-to-face) business-related networking communities? But I think there are a number of things you can do with ISS. Here are some reasons to pay attention to LinkedIn’s Social Sales Index.
Measuring your personal brand
Assessing your ISS is a great way to understand the strength of your personal brand and take concrete steps to improve it. After all, what gets measured gets managed, and you may not realize you’re behind your peers until it’s pointed out to you. As each improvement results in a higher score, ISS also provides the opportunity to make the process fun, increasing the likelihood that you will complete it.
Identify areas for improvement
You may feel like you’re at the top of your game on LinkedIn, but maybe you’re not making enough new connections or posting enough useful content. In any case, your ISS can easily highlight areas for improvement.
Use as reference
It is probably best to use the ISS as a reference instrument. This tool automatically compares your profile with others in your industry and network, so you can see at a glance where you currently stand. You can also use your personal account to track your improvements and growth as a social seller. This is exactly what Microsoft did with its sales team. When they first connected users to Sales Navigator, the average SSI was 48. After several months of training and activity, their average SSI score rose to 56. The impact of this increase has been significant. Those with a higher SSI had 37% more ability, or 4.3 more for every 10 points.
How to improve your ISS
No matter how low your SSI score is, there is probably something you can do to improve it. Below is a list of the five best strategies to improve ISS and increase your performance on the platform.
Complete your LinkedIn profile
The first and easiest thing you can do to improve your social selling score is to fully complete your profile. There’s a lot going on here, so here are some pointers to get you started.
- add a profile picture
- Enter your job title
- add a useful, keyword-rich summary
- Add your education and skills
- to ask for references from colleagues and customers
- Add examples of your work in the Examples section
You will be amazed how much your SSI score can increase if you fill out your profile correctly. Be careful. Don’t include so much information that your profile becomes unreadable. When adding information to your profile, always ask yourself if it will be useful to others.
Connect with the right people on LinkedIn
You need a large network to succeed on LinkedIn. Remember, it’s not just quantity that counts, but quality as well. This means that you should not send invitations to random people. Instead, you’re wasting your time looking for the right people. This means that people who :
- who know you personally
- are opinion leaders in their sector
- Work in your sector
- are the people you buy or sell from
The more cohesive your network is, the stronger it will be. Use LinkedIn’s advanced search feature to find the people you want to connect with. Some features are only available to premium accounts, but even free users can use filters to find relevant people and improve their SSI. You can also find related people under My Network > People you might know.
Publish high quality content that is targeted to LinkedIn users
One of the easiest ways to improve your SSI categories is to publish quality content. This will improve your personal brand, relationships and interactions with other users. Quality content can come in the form of LinkedIn posts, but you can also try more advanced tactics.
Interacting with the network and beyond
It is important to have a broad network, but it is equally important to interact with it. You need to maintain regular contact with much of your network to show the algorithm that you are committed to building long-term relationships. Don’t overwhelm people with requests to make contact. Set high goals for yourself and start following the thought leaders in your industry. Study their content carefully and try to strike up a conversation. Be sure to reply to anyone who comments on your posts. Conversations are becoming more important than ever on the platform. LinkedIn reports a 43% increase in conversations year-over-year for Q3 2023. The more you engage, the higher your SSI score will be and the more conversations you will have.
Use the sales browser
One of the reasons LinkedIn is promoting SSI is to promote the launch of Sales Navigator. In fact, it’s impossible to get anywhere near 100 without a paid subscription. If you’re already a Sales Navigator user, you’ll want to take advantage of as many of the tool’s features as possible. In particular, use the saved search feature to automate the search for relevant contacts.
Social sales index Q&A
What is a good SSI score on LinkedIn? A good LinkedIn SSI score is 70+. A value between 40 and 70 can be considered normal, and a value below 40 is bad. What is the importance of ISS? A good SSI score will help you increase your influence on the platform and ensure that you are doing everything right to be a good social marketer. How often is my ISS updated? LinkedIn updates the Social Sales Index once a day. How is the social sales index calculated? LinkedIn uses four categories to calculate a social sales index: Building a personal brand, finding the right people, getting attention and building relationships. Each category is awarded 25 points.
Social sales index Conclusion
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index shows how effectively you use the platform. Given the importance of social selling in many B2B industries, this insight is essential. It’s also a way to see how you compare to competitors in your industry and find areas for improvement. By taking a little extra time to create your profile, develop your network and interact with your peers on the platform, you can skyrocket your SSI. This can result in a significant increase in leads and sales. So go ahead and let LinkedIn work harder for you. What is your best SSI score? 
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I improve my social selling index?
As you learn about the social selling index, you will be able to better understand the marketer’s intent behind the data. The index measures the rate at which members of your network buy and share items, and it also tracks the rate at which they accept direct sales from your network members. By comparing your network’s social selling index with your own, you can gain insight into your own marketing efforts as well as your network’s marketing efforts. This will allow you to keep your marketing efforts focused on increasing your sales and better connecting with your existing customers. The social selling index is a metric that indicates the relationship between the amount of social media interaction between salespeople and the likelihood of a transaction going through. Does your sales team have too much or too little social interaction? Do they use the right channels to promote a deal?
What is my LinkedIn social selling index?
LinkedIn offers a handy tool for salespeople, which is the social selling index. The social selling index lets you monitor your social media posts and other similar data to see how well you are doing on LinkedIn. There are some people, mostly marketers, that have been promoting the idea of using LinkedIn’s social selling index (SSI) to measure how effective their LinkedIn profiles are in promoting their business. I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I think it’s a useful tool to use. But it’s a starting point, not a complete picture.
How is LinkedIn SSI score calculated?
LinkedIn’s powerful Social Selling Index gives you an idea of how effective your social content is compared to your competitors’ content and specific industry type. This score provides you with valuable insight into how you can use LinkedIn for Social Selling. To find out how your industry score compares to others, or to find out how yours has changed over time, login to your LinkedIn account and select the ‘My Account’ tab from the drop-down menu in the top-right corner of the page. Next, select the ‘Social Selling’ option from the drop-down menu bar that opens. —– The Social Selling Index was introduced last year as part of LinkedIn’s efforts to measure and improve its ability to help its members to sell more effectively. The SSI is a ranking of the strength of LinkedIn profiles, and it is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher a profile’s score, the more effective it is at helping members to generate sales leads. The SSI was recently updated, and it now provides a new way to gauge the effectiveness of the social selling strategies that your company is using to generate leads and close deals. Let’s take a look at how the SSI is calculated and what it means for your business.
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