With its SSI, LinkedIn aims to provide its own metric for making social selling success measurable so if you want to increase your success for lead generation, pay attention to your SSI.

What does the Social Selling Index mean?

The SSI, LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index, is a standardized numerical value ranging from 0 to 100 that LinkedIn originally only created for sales professionals. According to the business network, it measures how effective and successful a user is at establishing their personal professional brand, engaging with insights, networking, and building relationships.

Any LinkedIn member can view their personal SSI by simply visiting the following URL:

https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

The value is updated every day. The maximum achievable score of 100 points comprises four individual criteria worth 25 points each.
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Calculating the SSI?

Of course, LinkedIn doesn’t fully disclose what criteria exactly make up its Social Selling Index and how they are weighted. However, it does reveal that the following factors influence the SSI score:

1. Profile – establishing a professional personal brand: a complete and informative profile including a cover photo and multimedia content, endorsements of listed skills and recommendations from other users, posts, and followers from posts.
2. Search – finding the right people: using the people search and Lead Builder, how often you view profiles of target customers, inbound profile views, leads saved, how frequently you’re active.
3. Sharing – engaging with insights: Engaging with others’ posts, writing your own posts and receiving engagements on them, sharing others’ posts, active membership in relevant groups, sending messages, how high the response rate is to your sent InMail messages, how quickly you respond to others’ messages yourself.
4. Networking – building strong relationships: number of connections, quality of those connections (e.g. industry relevance and number of C-level connections as well as connections with decision-making power), acceptance rate for connection requests sent.

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Generally, if you present yourself well on the platform, are frequently active, post valuable content, share good content from other users, interact with prospective customers, and build yourself a network of relevant connections, you’ll be rewarded with a high SSI. However, if you’re not active on a regular basis, are passive, and don’t create or share content, you’ll be penalized with a low SSI. Low response rates to InMails and low acceptance rates for sent connection requests are also rated negatively.

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We at Leadriver can help you accelerate your social selling efforts to systematically generate a higher SSI score and more qualified leads on a monthly basis via LinkedIn based on your campaign objectives. Contact us at info@leadriver.io to find out how.