Four components of your SSI score
Each component gives you between 0 and 25 points. Your total SSI score is the sum of these four indicators (max. 100). Here is a brief description of each of them.
1. Establish your professional brand
Personal branding on LinkedIn is all about how you present yourself on the platform, from completing your profile to the quality of the content you share. This is where you showcase your experience and skills.
2. Find the right people
Networking is an integral part of LinkedIn. The platform encourages you to connect uae number data with relevant prospects, influencers, and decision-makers in your industry or target market. Interacting with these people can lead to valuable opportunities for collaboration, mentoring, and business development.
3. Interact with knowledge
This component of the SSI reflects your activity on the platform, including how often you share and interact with other users' posts, participate in discussions, and offer valuable insights.
4. Build relationships
This aspect measures your effectiveness in nurturing and maintaining relationships with your connections. It shows how well you interact with them, provide value, and establish trust over time.
Below is a summary of the steps you need to take to increase your Social Selling Index.
Components of the LinkedIn Social Selling Index
What needs to be done?
Brand building
Complete all sections of your profile:
-Include images, videos, presentations.
-Add a professional profile photo and background image with relevant information about yourself (your role, contact information, etc.)
-Get recommendations from your connections.
-Regularly create and interact with LinkedIn posts.
Stronger relationships
Enhance your network with:
-Relevant connections
-VP-level LinkedIn members
-Niche-specific professionals
Appropriate audiences
Improve prospecting with:
-Advanced lead and account search filters
-Specific profile views
-Saved lead lists
-More active days on the platform
Share relevant information
Get and receive:
-Content interactions
-Quality posts
-Active shares
-Messages/InMails sent/response rate
-Group invitations
The path to a higher SSI
In this section, I will provide my tips and tricks to increase your SSI score over the course of a few weeks.
How to Increase SSI Score on LinkedIn
Complete your LinkedIn profile carefully
Find relevant contacts
Be aware of LinkedIn's limits
Encourage interactions outside the platform
Engage your audience in multiple ways
Analyze and track your progress
Use reliable LinkedIn automation tools
1. Carefully complete your LinkedIn profile
Establishing your professional brand means ensuring that your LinkedIn profile speaks directly to your target audience.
What I've learned is that your profile matters. You'll shine brighter if you:
Your profile picture shows your personality,
A background image catches attention,
You have a catchy tagline, a personalized summary, detailed experience, featured recommendations, etc.
Let me share an example of a profile that inspired me to improve mine:
LinkedIn Profile
This profile has a detailed description with relevant keywords and a clear profile photo. It also reflects a person's consistency in sharing useful content and interacting with others in their professional network.
Your profile should be top-notch to help you become a respected voice in your field and earn more points toward your SSI.
I already had a proper profile picture and a description of my blogging career on my page, but after checking out the main pages on the platform, I realized I needed to liven it up a bit. So I added more information in the “About” section, as well as skills and recommendations (they really matter for establishing your brand):
And that brought positive results for my SSI on LinkedIn.
A quick checklist for brand building on LinkedIn:
Complete Profile: Optimize your LinkedIn profile to fit your audience’s specific needs.
Multimedia: Incorporate various types of media into your profile, such as blog snippets or videos.
Cover Photo: Use a cover photo that enhances your brand.
Recommendations: Show them to highlight your value proposition.
Long-form content and followers: Craft insightful posts to enrich your profile page and attract more followers.
→ Do you want to transform your LinkedIn profile into a powerful sales tool? Download our free guide and start optimizing your account today!
2. Find relevant contacts
Identifying your target audience and engaging with the right people is vital to making your LinkedIn campaign successful and improving your SSI.
For example, LinkedIn's Sales Navigator automatically shows your leads' relationships with people you already know. Let's say you're viewing Person B's profile, but you have Person A in your contacts; Sales Navigator will show your connections with Person C, who is known to both of you. This helps you build better relationships through mutual connections.
Additionally, if you dig deeper into your search for a particular company where your target lead works, you may find other people who share the same contacts as you.
So, I was looking for new leads on a daily basis through the advanced filters and paying attention to recommended contacts. Thanks to my new strategy, my network is now full of relevant contacts.
A quick checklist for finding the right people on LinkedIn:
Advanced lead and account searches: Take advantage of these tools to locate your target audience and prospects. Focus on quality over quantity.
Incoming prospecting and profile views: Monitor how many prospects have visited your profile. Increasing interest indicates that you are gaining more popularity.
Saved Leads: Evaluate the quality and quantity of saved leads. Avoid connecting with irrelevant matches.
Active Days: Stay online and interact consistently with the right people.
3. Be aware of LinkedIn's limits
The next step was to send connections and interact with contacts in a smart way. When I say “smart,” I mean staying within limits.
With Sales Navigator , you are typically restricted to 50 InMails per month and 100-150 invitations per week. The maximum number of credits you can accumulate in total is 150.
→ Here is a helpful article about LinkedIn invitation limits and how to manage them.
These limits meant that I had to focus on people close to my field of work. Yes, it took me some time to do some research to send invitations to decision makers and experts in my industry, but it was worth it.
What's more, daily research helped me support my invitations with personalized messages. This also positively influenced my LinkedIn Social Selling Index.
96% of marketers recognize the impact of personalized communication in promoting repeat sales. An additional 94% recognize its effectiveness in driving overall sales growth.
Finally, I monitored my acceptance rate and removed contacts who didn't accept my invitation within two weeks. That's another good tip to keep up with LinkedIn's algorithms.
A quick checklist for engaging with the LinkedIn community:
Acceptance Rates: Monitor the acceptance of connection requests to assess meaningful engagement.
4. Encourage interactions outside the platform
I want to emphasize the importance of communicating with your prospects using other means, such as emails. This helps you expand your potential customer base and build a substantial lead generation strategy.
