Social Selling Index, your reputation on LinkedIn

The Social Selling Index is an additional tool to help you manage your career by attracting opportunities on LinkedIn.

Social Selling Index, a feature created by LinkedIn will not directly bring customers or recruiters to you. It allows you to measure the impact of the actions you take on this social network. To make you stand out in the professional sphere and build you a beautiful e-reputation.

With this measure of the effectiveness of your strategy, you are able to constantly correct it, constantly improve it, make it more precise and targeted.

The following compendium should help you to better understand the use of LinkedIn's Social Selling Index. This, in the end, is a first step towards total control.

What is the Social Selling Index?

LinkedIn assigns a Social Selling Index (SSI) to each of its subscribers. This is one in 100, which is the average of four "skills" required to implement social selling: developing your business using social networks. Each competency is rated out of 25.

These four competencies are as follows:

1. The ability to build a professional brand,
2. The ability to find the right people. Those that will allow you to increase your turnover or get a new job),
3. The talent to exchange information,
4. Your ability to establish new relationships.

The Social Selling Index notes your ability to effectively deploy a social selling campaign on LinkedIn. And it changes every day since it is permanently calculated.

The SSI is presented on a special page called the Social Selling Dashboard. On this one, you can follow the evolution over a week of your SSI (Social Selling Index weekly). This is an indication of your positioning. With regard to the average of your sector of activity and that of your network.

The consultation of this dashboard is free of charge. You must pay a subscription to use Sales Navigator on which you appropriate tools to improve your SSI. The improvement of the latter means that your chances of signing new professional contracts increase.

How to access your score?

• Log in to your account.
• Go to https://business.linkedin.com/fr-fr/sales-solutions/social-selling/le-social-selling-index-ssi
• Click on "Get your score for free".

The skills selected by LinkedIn

You have learned that LinkedIn retains 4 skills to determine your Social Selling Index. In this paragraph, you will discover what each of them means.

1. The ability to build a professional brand. Complete your profile correctly. The information you present should be useful to your prospects and customers. At the same time, LinkedIn checks that you regularly publish articles of interest. These publications, provided they are regular and contain interesting content, will make you an opinion leader.
2. The ability to find the right people. LinkedIn determines if you know how to use the prospect search tools it makes available to you.
3. Your ability to exchange information. The articles you share on your profile are interesting (do they attract attention?). For him, such an approach on the part of a subscriber allows him to establish new relationships with other members and to strengthen them.
4. The ability to establish new relationships. LinkedIn determines whether you can connect with and gain the trust of decision-makers, two essential points that contribute to strengthening your network.

These four skills are presented by LinkedIn as the pillars of social selling. By quantifying them (score), LinkedIn helps you to better understand your level at each of them. A low Social Selling Index results from a gap in one or more of these 4 pillars. You only need to see which skills your scores were the lowest to know your weaknesses. It is up to you to take effective measures to increase your scores. A high Social Selling Index means that you master all 4 skills. In concrete terms, your social selling strategy is successful. It should be noted that the scores and the final score are calculated using an algorithm.

What is the purpose of the Social Selling Index?

By creating Social Selling Index, Linkedin aims to make each of its subscribers, whether free or paid, an expert in social selling.

By seeking to improve your score, you are constantly refining your strategy. Social selling will eventually no longer have any secrets for you.

An individual who uses social selling comes across more opportunities than others, achieves and surpasses his objectives much more quickly than others, sells more than others.

The four skills selected to determine your Social Selling Index have an impact on your digital image. This is why the Social Selling Index is perceived as an e-reputation indicator on LinkedIn. A Social Selling strategy must always be based on e-reputation if it is to have the maximum chance of success.

How to use the Social Selling Index properly?

When your Social Selling Index is low, look at the scores you have obtained in the 4 skills. Focus your efforts on skills with unsatisfactory scores. At the same time, improve on the other skills. Here are some tips that can help you to read your Social Selling Index.

Is your professional brand disappointing for LinkedIn?

Review the way you completed your profile. Filling in all the fields is not enough. Give readers data that will help them get to know you better and understand your business.

For LinkedIn you seem to have trouble finding the right people?

Review the list of your contacts and make sure that they have a direct or indirect link with your business and especially that they are likely to be transformed into prospects. Correctly target members to whom you send contact requests.

This involves spending time carefully reading each person's profile to determine whether a connection between you is of commercial or professional interest.

LinkedIn believes that you do not exchange enough information or that the information you exchange is not relevant enough?

Review the quality of the documents you share (how does it relate to your business? Do they provide additional and new knowledge? Do you accompany each sharing with a reflection? Have you considered checking the sources? Are they obsolete or topical articles?...).

LinkedIn "thinks" that you are clumsy when it comes to building relationships with decision-makers?

Become bold, take initiative, learn to act tactfully. When you want to get in touch with an influential person in your field of activity.