The Importance of Social Selling During Transition

I started using LinkedIn during my last transition a couple of years ago. Like most veterans, I had never used social media in my life and I was clueless as to how it worked. I was told I need to establish my “brand” by posting. I started posting and wrote my first LinkedIn article. What I noticed was I was not getting any distribution statistics. I obviously had an invalid assumption that LinkedIn would at least share my posts/articles with my connections. #LinkedIn, why am I connecting with these people if you are not going to share my content with them?

Being a problem solver, I had to get to the bottom of this. I started following LinkedIn gurus like Andy Foote, Bill McCormick, Angus Gandy, Kevin Turner, Bradley Batdorf, Sid Clark, Richard van der Bloom, Jeff Young, and Ed Han. They would talk about things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and “the algorithm.” Then, I stumbled across something called SSI or the Social Selling Index. SSI is a free utility supplied directly by LinkedIn. It provides some insight into how you are doing on LinkedIn and whether your content is going to reach anyone. The higher your score, the more reach you will receive.

Now, as a veteran, the idea of selling is a foreign concept, unless you were a recruiter, which I was not. While some people are selling on LinkedIn, its primary purpose is a professional networking application. If you think about it though, if you are in transition, you will need to sell yourself to recruiters and perspective employers on, “Why should I hire you?”

So, if you are like me, you would like some feedback on how well you are marketing yourself and get some insight into how you can improve. This is where the SSI utility comes in. The following is the link to see your current SSI score:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/sales/ssi

The index is broken into the following four parts: Establish your professional brand; Find the right people; Engage with insights; and Build Relationships. The hotlinks below will take you to LinkedIn’s explanations of each of the parts. I will also share will share what I have done in each area.

Establish Your Professional Brand

As I said earlier, I thought writing an article would be a good way to start my brand. I have since written 10 LinkedIn articles and while they are a part of my brand, they do not get wide distribution and they make up a very minor part of my Professional Brand score. What does drive your Professional Brand score up is authoritative posting and commenting. You are a subject matter expert on something. Tell us about it! For veterans, the easiest thing you can do is talk about your experiences in the Military. There are plenty of veterans already posting content. If you had a similar experience as they posted, tell us your story in a comment. Post a story about an experience you had and ask for people to tell about their experiences. In this category, I started noticing the LinkedIn Rockstar list produced by Brenda Meller. I had started talking to her about it and thought I could do something similar in the veteran community. So, with her encouragement, the Veterati Rockstar list was born. I produce the list to give recognition to volunteer mentors who have completed 100 calls on the platform. We even created a hashtag (#veteratirockstars) that you can follow to keep up with the latest list.

Find the Right People??????????????????????????

This category can be tricky for veterans. This is calculated by the industry you want to be associated with on LinkedIn. In my case, I selected Information Technology as my industry. However, I am here to help veterans transition. So, I connect with hundreds of veterans and hundreds of recruiters who are not in the IT industry. I am okay with this as I am still able to accomplish my objectives of helping veterans.

Engage With Insights

Here, I have found I can make this score go up by sharing someone else’s article or post. When you share, you need to write an authoritative summary about the article and once you have posted it, you need to respond to each and every comment. This is called engagement. Just sharing is not good enough and your score may actually be lowered if you do nothing.

Build Relationships

In this category, you get rewarded for connecting with people and talking with them. I make a habit of trying to connect with 3-5 quality individuals per day. I connect with veterans, recruiters, and key individuals in companies and industries I follow. Just connecting is not enough. This is where InMail comes into play. InMail is the direct message capability built into LinkedIn. It keeps a history of all of your conversations.?I will scroll through conversations I have had with veterati mentees and check up on them from time to time. All InMail conversations are considered good when calculating the Build Relationships score.

The SSI scores are updated daily. I would recommend checking your score periodically (weekly or monthly) to ensure you are staying on track and reaching the audiences you want to reach. Comment below with your scores and provide any insight you have with improving your Social Selling Index.