Until now LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) has only been available to paying customers, but now everyone can have their SSI score calculated free of charge. With this score, you can “take the temperature” of your work with Social Selling.
When you measure the success of your Social Selling efforts, there are many things to take into consideration. LinkedIn cannot assess the relevance of our actions, so they have therefore chosen to calculate the SSI score by using the following criteria:
- Your personal brand
- Finding the right profiles
- Your engagement on LinkedIn
- Building up valuable relations.
With LinkedIn’s tool, you can see how you compare in relation to your industry and your own network, as well as which parameters, according to LinkedIn, you need to improve in order to achieve a higher SSI score. Your SSI score is updated daily.
You receive an overview of the progress of your SSI score, which for most of us shows that we have just been on summer holiday.
At the bottom of the page, you can see how your industry is represented, as well as the average score for your LinkedIn network.
Which data does LinkedIn use to calculate Social Selling Index?
LinkedIn uses a range of different data to calculate your SSI score; among them are the following:
Your personal brand
- How complete your profile is, including endorsements
- Have you published Posts on LinkedIn, and how many new followers has this created?
Find the right profiles
- Profile searches
- Profile views
- Activity level
Your engagement on LinkedIn
- Shares, likes, comments etc.
- Messages sent and responses to these
- Groups you are a member of and your activity in these
Your ability to build valuable relations
- Connections
- Your “acceptance rate” – i.e. how many accept your request to connect.
If you use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, the figures from here are also calculated into your SSI score.
Is SSI a good tool for measuring my Social Selling efforts?
Both yes and no. When you look at the amount of data that is taken into account in the SSI calculation, this gives a relatively good picture of your efforts. On the other hand, SSI cannot measure relevance or content. The figures don’t tell us whether you are connecting with the “right” people, or whether the content of your messages includes booking meetings or sending out invitations, or whether the communication is completely irrelevant.
In this article we provide suggestions for more in-depth metrics for your Social Selling ROI.