LinkedIn is not just a social network site to connect with your industry professionals and peers, but an opportunity for brands and businesses to bank on its marketing offerings. It’s been 20 years since the launch of this ‘business and employment-focused networking platform’ and throughout these 2 decades, it went through many modifications to become a strong community of working professionals and businesses/brands. Targeting potential clients and selling end products or services to them is the current scenario that B2B businesses are indulging themselves in. Therefore, maintaining a high Social Selling Index (SSI) score has become the need of the hour for almost every corporate entity out there.
What is LinkedIn SSI Score in LinkedIn Marketing?
When it comes to LinkedIn marketing, whether in the UK or anywhere else, a number of brands are making the most of this facility to not just boost their prospect of selling but also create a large community of people that is ready to connect with others who have similar interests. LinkedIn is often used by brands to find prospects, deliver the ultimate brand value, engage the audience in new and brand-related conversations, and build strong relationships with the goal of creating interesting sales opportunities. That is also called Social Selling.
The formula LinkedIn uses to measure the performance of social selling is called the Social Selling Index (SSI) score. It is commonly measured on a scale from 0 to 100. The selling efforts are measured and scored on the following basis:
- Community or brand associates’ ability to build exceptional relationships
- build a professional brand
- classify and categorize prospects
- getting involved in valuable conversations
Although it has been less than a decade since this feature was introduced in the year 2014 to help businesses and business persons to target more precisely, but it has shown significant results in a short span of time. Some of its benefits include:
- Improved Branding: If you happen to have a strong SSI, it means you are consistent in building your brand over the networking site. It also signifies among your followers, connections, and community that you are a brand of some authority in your field of expertise.
- Greater Visibility: If your company page or professional (business) profile has a high score on SSI, there are more chances that it will become more visible on LinkedIn. And that increased visibility gets you more profile views as well as connection requests.
- More Credibility: A high SSI score and a strong LinkedIn profile are crucial factors in strengthening your credibility. After finding your proactive and engaging (professional) side as you network, people from your connections are more likely to believe you and value your expertise.
- Collaboration Opportunities: Once you become more visible with a high SSI score, you have a higher chance of getting collaboration opportunities from professional community, witnessing more partnership prospects, and a few more things.
How to Boost Your SSI Score?
1. Optimize and Update Profile
To ensure a high SSI score, you need to complete your professional profile over LinkedIn as it represents you and your brand. And to get started with it, you need to have a professional photo, an enthralling headline, a comprehensive summary, as well as your skills and experience. Your up-to-date achievements, skills, and projects showcase your activeness on the platform.
2. Build Network to Engage
It would be great if you focus on building a network by connecting with professionals who are from your industry and share your common interests. To bank on it, you have to like, comment, and share content from your network, industry, and community. It will eventually contribute towards showing you as an active professional in the industry and further boost your visibility.
3. Content Sharing
You have to be active in sharing content on your LinkedIn page or profile. It keeps people in your network aware of your activity and they start paying more attention to your content if they find it relatable and up to their liking. You can also write and publish articles on LinkedIn that show your competence. This way you get to reach a huge section of the audience.
4. Sales Navigation
Try to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, if you can. It’s a premium tool with advanced features that let you do social selling without much hassle. For example, you can go full power with your lead gen camp, nurture your relationship with your connections, continue with valuable prospecting, and a few more benefits. Some of its other advantages include InMail facility, lead recommendations, real-time updates, CRM integration, enjoy advanced analytics and reporting, to name a few.
5. Monitor and Analyse
Other than being consistent with your content, you need to keep an eye on your SSI score on a regular basis, to omit unnecessary tasks and add on something new. This constant monitoring and analysis of your activities will help you improve with industry learnings. You need to communicate your USP in order to build yourself as a strong brand and draw in some desirable opportunities.
Conclusion
If you smartly follow all these strategies, you can certainly boost your SSI score on LinkedIn, which will ultimately help you build professional relationships with your industry peers. To ensure that things go the right way, the social media marketing company in the UK, SkyTrust will help you implement the right strategy that will make you the SSI master in due course of time. Get in touch with us to know more.
